# **5 Data**

## **5.1 Survey Description**

We use primary data on the participation in _Mahila Samakhya_ , female empowerment, child welfare, and social networks of 487 Uttarakhandi women. The survey and sampling strategy, described in detail in Kandpal and Baylis (2011), covers 69 villages in six Uttarakhand districts, four with the program and two without. The villages in our sample were randomly chosen from the six districts. The sample size is 487 women. The survey was designed to trace self-reported networks, and hence was implemented using restricted snowball sampling. We first randomly sampled a woman in each village, asked her about five people she is in regular contact with, then conducted follow-up interviews with two randomly-chosen friends from these five. We repeated this process once, for each network. As a result, starting with one randomly chosen woman, we ended with networks of seven women. The top code of five for listing friends was introduced due to budgetary restrictions, but after considerable pre-testing. With and without a top code (as well as with larger top codes), we found that most women were not able to name more than five people outside the immediate family who they were in contact with on a regular basis.

The survey instrument includes the following key questions to help identify the effect of participation in the _Mahila Samakhya_ intervention on an individual’s level of empowerment. _Female Empowerment Dependent Variables:_ (1) Access to Outside Employment: whether the respondent has an identification card for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). (2) Physical Mobility: whether the woman can leave the house without permission.<sup>6</sup> (3) Political Participation: whether the woman participates in the local village council. (4) Proxy for Initial Bargaining Power: the woman’s age relative to that of her husband.

_Participation:_ (1) Whether the woman participates in the _Mahila Samakhya_ intervention. (2) How long the program has been in her village. (3) Exposure to the program: the interaction of the number of years the program has been in her village with the woman’s age minus sixteen.<sup>7</sup> _Other Socioeconomic Characteristics:_ (1) Literacy and educational attainment.<sup>8</sup> (2) The number of male and female children born to the woman and their ages. (3) The woman’s caste: since outcomes like physical mobility and political participation depend on social class, we find it important to control for the woman’s caste, and wealth, as proxied by (4) the number of rooms in the house and the primary source of lighting. We also control for (5) the amount of time, in minutes, a woman spends collecting firewood each day, which reflects the amount of free time she has to participate in _Mahila Samakhya_ .<sup>9</sup> The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, NREGS, guarantees at least a hundred

> 6Since this variable is difficult to verify, it might suffer from reporting bias: participants know the “correct answer” to this question is that they do not need permission to leave the house, and thus might be systematically more likely to overstate their physical mobility than non-participants. However, in field tests, we observed that participants were significantly more sensitive to their lack of household bargaining power and were likely to underreport the amount of say they had in the household because the program had made them aware of the entire feasible set of outcomes for women. Therefore, if we were to expect a sizable reporting bias by participants, it would be in the downward direction, i.e. participants would be likely to underreport their physical mobility.

> 7We subtract sixteen because women younger than sixteen cannot participate.

> 8We asked participants about literacy and educational attainment prior to participation. Because the program is not viewed as a school, many participants distinguished between their educational attainment and learning via _Mahila Samakhya_ even without our asking.

> 9Note that Uttarkhand is a exogamous, patrilocal society, and women typically move to another village after marriage, and live in their in-laws’ joint family home. Thus, they have little or no say in how far they need to travel to collect

11