gender-specific constraints also include a dramatic soft-skills gender-gap in Sub-Saharan Africa, with men consistently scoring significantly higher on a range of soft-skills measures (Ajayi et al., 2022).<sup>12</sup> Closing the skills gender gap by strengthening inter and intrapersonal skills may help women negotiate within the household, expand their job search practices, and ultimately improve their labor market outcomes. The evidence base is still thin, with none of the papers focused on the effects of soft skills training for highly educated youth cited above conducting heterogeneity by gender, and with papers focused on less-educated samples finding mixed evidence.<sup>13</sup> We find similar take-up of soft skills training for women and men, and no significant differences in treatment effects.

The paper continues as follows. Section 2 presents the experimental design, data, and COVID19 context. Section 3 describes the methodology and presents the results. Finally, Section 4 concludes.

# **2 Experimental design, data, and COVID-19 context**

We evaluate a soft skills training for recent tertiary education graduates in Rwanda. The project was implemented by the University of Rwanda in collaboration with the Rwanda Development Board (RBD). RDB advertised the program on several local online job boards and invited youth who graduated from university or technical/vocational education programs after 2018 to apply. Ultimately, these advertisements yielded more eligible applicants for the training than could be accommodated by the implementing organization; we use this over-subscription together with in-person lotteries to randomize 900 eligible applicants—stratified by gender—to either the soft skills training or a control group.

Of the 2,390 eligible applicants who completed an initial short application form, 1,779 completed a longer baseline survey. Of these, 500 young men and 500 young women were randomly selected and invited to attend one of three regional, in-person lotteries to allocate the vacancies

> top 5 countries in the 2019 Africa Gender Equality Index—there are still prominent gaps in some areas. In 2021, labor force participation was 62% for men and 47% for women, and the share of youth not in education, employment or training was 41% for women and 30% for men (Rwandan National Institute of Statistics, 2022).

> 12Notably, the observed soft-skills gender gap is largest among the most educated and returns to these soft skills vary by gender, with intrapersonal skills strongly correlated with women’s earnings.

> 13Groh et al. (2016) have a sample of only educated women and find no effects of soft skills training on labor market outcomes. Among the papers focused on lower-educated samples, Acevedo et al. (2020) find more positive effects of internships combined with soft skills training for women than for men on personal skills, expectations and short-run labor market outcomes; while Barrera-Osorio et al. (2020) find mainly similar effects of vocational training with focus on soft skills for men and women, with some evidence of stronger effects for men. Among papers studying non-labor market outcomes, Campos et al. (2017) find large effects for both men and women of personal initiative training on business outcomes in Togo, and Ashraf et al. (2020) find significant effects on education outcomes of a training focused on negotiation skills for girls in Zambia.

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