How did you come to choose your research topic?

I have always been interested in topics related to under-represented and marginalised groups. After completing my master’s in economics, I decided to pursue research in this area, using experimental methods.

During the first year of my PhD, my supervisor, Professor Lore Vandewalle invited me to join a research project on women’s labour force participation and financial inclusion in Bangladesh. I started developing my research question in January 2020, during my second visit to Bangladesh, while conducting focus groups with small business owners and villagers. At the time I was interviewing mostly men, asking whether they had any female employees, or whether any women in their household worked, had a bank account or used mobile money services. Very few did. When I inquired about the reasons, I expected to hear about cultural norms, costs, or lack of necessity. Instead, many men stated that women were simply not skilled enough, did not know how to use a phone, or couldn’t manage money. However, when we spoke to women, we quickly realised that they knew more about money and household management than their husbands assumed. This discrepancy raised some questions: Why was the information we collected so discrepant? Did these men claim women were less skilled to justify restrictive social norms? Could it be that there was some information missing between family members, perhaps due to the fact that women rarely have the chance to show their skills, exactly because of those very norms? Was this one of the reasons why women were excluded from household decisions and did not work? While I could not immediately answer these questions, I decided it would be the goal of my thesis to investigate them more systematically.

How did you carry out this investigation and what results did it produce?

My research investigates whether gender discrimination arises from a lack of information about women’s abilities, leading individuals to rely on stereotypes. To explore this, I conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with married couples in rural Bangladesh.

The baseline surveys with the couples confirmed that women are perceived as less skilled than men, and the worse they are perceived, the less they are involved in decision-making. To understand the impact of these biases, I invited these couples to take part in an incentivised decision-making game. During the game, spouses play simultaneously but separately; they make allocation decisions and answer questions from a standardised cognitive skills test. On top of answering questions, individuals estimate their own and their spouse’s scores. Half-way through the game, couples in the treated group receive an information update on the cognitive abilities of the wife.

The results reveal gender differences in the way spouses perceive each other, and how these perceptions are based on gender stereotypes. Despite men and women performing equally well in the game, men consistently underestimate their wives’ abilities, believing they answered fewer questions correctly. Men’s perceptions are strongly influenced by conservative gender attitudes. Men with stronger gender stereotypes hold particularly negative opinions about their wives’ capabilities. When I compare the game outcomes of treated and control couples, the results show that individuals who at baseline had the worst perceptions about women’s abilities are those who react the most to the treatment: after the information provision, their beliefs and their allocations towards women improve. The same occurs for spouses who have been married for a shorter amount of time and do not know each other well yet. Two weeks after the treatment, women report being more involved in household decisions. These results corroborate the initial hypothesis that gender discrimination within households has a statistical component and that making women’s abilities more visible can shift perceptions.

In the last part of the thesis, I leave the household dimension to understand if gender stereotypes affect hiring preferences. The literature on gender discrimination in labour markets has mostly focused on supply-side barriers. I use data from a randomised control trial where small business owners receive subsidies to hire female employees, and I compare candidates’ perceived and actual skills. On average, male candidates are more qualified than female ones but even when I control for the actual skill level, employers’ perceptions about women’s abilities remain negative. When I rank candidates according to the employers’ beliefs about skills, women are further penalised and appear in worse ranking positions than they should. These results highlight the presence of an additional barrier to women’s labour force participation: women struggle to enter the pool of potential candidates, and even when they do, they are still perceived as worse than men.

What could be the social and political implications of your thesis?

My research brings an important insight, using a relatively simple and cost-effective intervention: making women’s abilities more observable can improve their agency and involvement in decision-making. In practical terms, formal recognition — such as workshop and training certificates — could be an effective way to signal women’s ability within the household and reduce gender discrimination by eliminating information gaps.

In contexts with restrictive social norms, gender stereotypes interact with these norms, further reinforcing gender discrimination and constraining women to specific activities and behaviours. Gender stereotypes operate through perceptions, especially about abilities and performance, and perceptions shape decisions. Decisions, and in particular how individuals make them, are the core of economics. Understanding the link between perceptions, norms, gender stereotypes and decisions is crucial to achieve gender equality and foster economic development.

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Carlotta Nani defended her PhD thesis in Development Economics, titled “Perceptions, Stereotypes and the Gender Gap: Three Essays in Development Economics”, on 5 March 2025. Associate Professor Julia Cajal Grossi presided over the committee, which included Professor Lore Vandewalle, Thesis Director, and, as external reader, Lucia Corno, Associate Professor, Faculty of Economics, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Nani, Carlotta. “Perceptions, Stereotypes and the Gender Gap: Three Essays in Development Economics.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2025.

Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Anyone interested in Dr Nani’s research can contact her by email.

Banner image: Part of a photo taken by Carlotta Nani in Bangladesh.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.