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India’s persistent gender inequalities remain a major obstacle to inclusive social and economic development. Patriarchal norms are deeply embedded in the country’s economic, social, and political systems, limiting progress toward gender equality. To address this, I recently piloted a gender-norms-targeted intervention in Ranchi, Jharkhand, India—specifically designed for digital labor platforms.

This pilot study, conducted in collaboration with , a digital job platform supporting low-income communities, aimed to test a scalable, cost-effective intervention embedded within the daily workflows of digital workers. The intervention focused on influencing gender attitudes among adult, married men in urban and semi-urban India through persuasive messaging and targeted surveys.

The goal was to evaluate whether these tools effectively gather relevant data and shift gender-related beliefs. By integrating this approach into a digital labor platform, the study explores a promising new pathway to challenge entrenched patriarchal norms and promote gender equality in India’s emerging digital economy.

Designing and Leading a Gender Norms Field Experiment in India: From Concept to Digital Integration 

While I have prior experience implementing large-scale field experiments from my time as a research associate at , diving into the deep end of designing and implementing my own field experiment and effectively playing the role of PI, research manager, and research associate all at once was a wholly different challenge. Among the many enablers who saw value in my project proposal was the , who funded my logistics pilot.

I spent Fall 2024 designing the gender-norms targeted intervention, creating surveys to capture baseline and endline outcome variables, and getting multiple rounds of feedback from both my academic advisors at and the implementation partner’s tech and research team. Lots of energy also went into gathering research funds, permissions, and protocols for this project.

In January 2025, I landed in Bangalore and spent a day co-working with the front-end development team at Karya, integrating the surveys and intervention from a labyrinth of google docs and spreadsheets to the actual mobile application based digital labor platform; a hugely rewarding experience.You hear about the never-ending innovative energy of Bangalore, India’s tech-startup capital, but seeing the remarkable talent of young engineers and developers working to revolutionize digital labor in action was a real privilege.

Bridging Theory and Practice in Digital Labor Research

Our next stop was Ranchi, where a group of workers from the target population for the persuasion experiment completed the surveys and intervention-related tasks on the mobile application. This was a dress rehearsal for the project which immediately made obvious the gaps between theory and practice.

Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand—India’s second poorest state—offered a highly relevant setting for piloting a gender norms intervention. As of 2021, urban female labor force participation in the region was just 13%, highlighting the significant gender gap in employment. According to the most recent census data, Jharkhand has a more male-skewed sex ratio (948 females per 1,000 males) than the national average, and nearly 50% of adult women in the state are illiterate.

Despite these challenges, Ranchi’s growing access to affordable mobile data and widespread smartphone use have made it a promising environment for digital employment solutions. Platforms like Karya, which provide micro-task-based jobs via mobile applications, are increasingly viable for reaching underserved populations—making Ranchi a strategic choice for this pilot intervention.

Key Lessons Learned: The Value of Iteration and On-the-Ground Testing

My biggest takeaway from launching this study is the importance of piloting—over and over again. By directly observing participants as they interacted with the mobile-based surveys, I uncovered practical insights that would have been missed remotely. For example, a question intended to assess whether a worker values his wife’s opinion on major purchases was consistently misunderstood—due to a translation issue—as asking whether he needs her permission. This confusion highlighted the need for precise language and cultural nuance in survey design.

Piloting also revealed gaps in user experience, such as the need for open-text boxes where participants could add context or clarify their responses. Additionally, several intervention tasks that seemed innovative in theory proved unrealistic during field implementation.

Despite travel disruptions caused by dense fog, I returned to Bangalore after several days of intensive testing in Ranchi. The final day was spent integrating these insights into the digital platform with Karya’s team and planning the full rollout of the intervention, scheduled for February 2025.

Many thanks are due – to everyone, including , who enabled the idea so that it finally made it out of my Dropbox project folder, to Safiya Husain – the co-founder at Karya who has so far been the practitioner partner to my researcher in the truest sense - the kindness of the workers and field coordinators that keeps on giving, and my beautiful, complex country that continues to teach me so much about how humans behave. It was wonderful being back “in the field” where I first discovered my love for development economics, and I’m looking forward to many more visits across India as I take this study on persuasion and gender norms home.