information about practices and programs that improve girls’ access and learning. Unterhalter et al. (2014) conduct a systematic review of education programs that target girls. Tembon and Fort (2008) document effective polices in six low‐ and middle‐income countries to promote gender equality. J‐PAL (2017) compares impacts by gender of programs – all evaluated by randomized controlled trial – designed to increase school enrollment and attendance in 28 low‐ and middle‐ income countries. Other reviews focus on adolescent girl programs that may also impact education outcomes (Haberland, McCarthy, and Brady 2018; Botea et al. 2017). As discussed above, these reviews – with the exception of J‐PAL (2017) – search for studies that highlight girls’ education in the title, abstract, introduction, or in the characterization of the interventions, and so they largely exclude non‐targeted interventions. For example, a common approach is to use terms such as “girls” or “gender” in the search for relevant studies and then to identify lessons learned from those studies, as do Unterhalter et al. (2014) and Haberland, McCarthy, and Brady (2018).

In addition, all the reviews except J‐PAL (2017) and Unterhalter et al. (2014) examine the evidence qualitatively, usually discussing study by study, and then infer conclusions. J‐PAL (2017) focuses only on access outcomes and within that, only on randomized controlled trials. Unterhalter et al. (2014) employs a form of vote‐counting.<sup>4</sup> To the best of our knowledge, there have been no systematic reviews that compare effect sizes quantitatively for both access and learning outcomes for girls’ education. This systematic review complements the existing literature in two ways: first, it incorporates a wide range of general education interventions that have not been included in previous studies of what works to improve girls’ learning and access to education; second, it converts the point estimates of all included studies into standardized effect sizes to allow easier comparison across studies.

# 3. Method

We gathered a large collection of studies that report education outcomes, either access or learning. For each of the studies, we identified whether or not they separately report impacts for boys and girls. For studies that separately report impacts for boys and girls, we extract those data, standardize the estimates, and use them to compare the impacts for boys versus girls and across programs for girls. For studies that do not separately report, we contacted the authors and asked them either to share the data or to provide the separate estimates themselves. In this section, we report on each step in detail.

## Literature search

We began with a comprehensive database of education impact evaluations compiled for Evans and Popova (2016) and subsequently updated it. The database consists of 495 studies that were

> 4 Vote counting consists of categorizing the results of studies by their results: negative and statistically significant, negative and statistically insignificant, positive and statistically insignificant, and positive and significant. Evans and Popova (2016)  includes a discussion of different types of systematic reviews and the respective advantages and disadvantages.

5