The top programs (90<sup>th</sup> percentile) of general interventions have slightly bigger measured effect sizes (0.52 standard deviations) than those of girl‐targeted interventions (0.43 standard deviations), although the differences are not statistically significant.

However, as with the access studies, the difference in the number of general interventions and girl‐targeted interventions is significant (Figure 8). This is even more the case in learning outcomes: there are 178 general learning interventions (from 106 studies) compared to only 14 girl‐targeted learning interventions (Table 1A). With just 14 girl‐targeted interventions (from 11 studies), the distribution of effect sizes might be affected by outliers: in fact, the large effect size of the top girl‐targeted intervention (at the 90<sup>th</sup> percentile) is purely driven by a school construction intervention (Burde and Linden 2013; Kazianga et al. 2013), which was designed specifically to increase girls’ access to schools.<sup>8</sup> When schools were built in villages in rural Burkina Faso, learning outcomes for girls dramatically improved. But taking out this intervention, the effect size of girl‐targeted interventions at the 90<sup>th</sup> percentile drops to 0.1 standard deviations. Alternatively, if one drops the largest two interventions from the general interventions, the effect size changes hardly at all.

These findings have two potential implications. The first is that while general and girl‐targeted interventions perform similarly on average, there are more proven general interventions that deliver high impacts for girls’ learning than there are girl‐targeted interventions. As a result, policy makers have more options to draw from among the general interventions. The second is that insofar as governments and other actors are experimenting with innovative girl‐targeted interventions, there may be value in evaluating these to build the evidence base.

For general interventions, do impacts on girls tend to be larger?

Previous research shows that the demand for girls’ schooling tends to be more responsive than that for boys’ to gender neutral education policies (Glick 2008; J‐PAL 2017). However, we do not detect much difference between girls and boys in responding to interventions to increase access at any point in the distribution – the least effective programs, the median programs, and the most effective programs all have similar impacts in access for boys and girls (Figure 9). If anything, general interventions seem to be slightly more effective for girls than for boys, confirming previous work.<sup>9</sup> Once in school, the impacts of general interventions on learning outcomes are also quite similar for girls and boys (Figure 10). Median interventions increased learning for girls and boys by 0.1 standard deviation for both, with slightly larger impacts for girls (Figure 10). At the top of the distribution (90<sup>th</sup> percentile), the effect for boys is 0.51 standard deviation, comparable to that

> 8 The Burkina Faso program, evaluated in (Kazianga et al. 2013), includes girls explicitly in the name of the program: the Burkinabe Response to Improve Girls’ Chances to Succeed.

> 9 We also examine whether impacts on girls are larger in places with low levels of initial performance, using the harmonized learning indicators from the World Bank’s Human Capital Index (World Bank 2018a) as well as various access indicators from the World Development Indicators. We find no relationship.

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