Higher Aspirations

A dynamic and contextualized account of the processes and mechanisms underlying gendered career decisions and attainment across the life course.

We find strong empirical evidence that raising aspirations is one route to empowering women. Higher aspirations on the part of husbands predicts more egalitarian gender attitudes for both the husband and his wife. However, higher aspirations on the part of wives may be an even more important predictor of women's empowerment. In particular, higher aspirations on the part of wives predict both more egalitarian gender attitudes (for both the husband and his wife) as well as greater involvement of women in household decision-making, as agreed by both the wife and her husband.

We use priming, a concept popular in social psychology, to study the effect of identity salience on aspirations for self and children as part of an impact evaluation in Odisha, India. We measure the effect of an individual’s genderand caste-identity salience on improving aspirations for themselves and for their children’s future profession and education. We find that when women are primed on gender, they exhibit higher aspirations for their daughters. Similarly, low-caste women primed on caste are more aspirational for their daughters. We do not find similar results for men. The effect of caste priming is more apparent in areas where significant ethnic heterogeneity exists and muted in ethnically homogenous areas. We find that aspirations for boys are already very high, thus priming has no effect on aspirations for sons.

In places with few casual or salaried employment opportunities, investments in farm or non-farm assets may offer the main pathway to increased incomes locally, whereas others may seek alternative investment options elsewhere—as migrants. What factors, then, explain these investment choices? One theory suggests that aspirations that are ahead, but not too far ahead, of current levels provide the best incentive for promoting investment. If this theory holds, then estimates of the relationship between the aspirations gap and investment choices should take the form of a non-monotonic inverted U-shape. We test for such a relationship between the income aspirations gap and investments in migration, farm assets, and non-farm assets using data from a household survey in rural Tajikistan. We find evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between the income aspirations gap and measures of migration, with the strongest relationship found with international migration. Strikingly, we do not observe any association between the income aspirations gap and measures of investment in farm or non-farm assets. Exploring heterogeneity, we find that these results can vary by household poverty status and by the respondent’s gender. Investigating a possible mechanism, we find that the relationship between the income aspirations gap and migration seems to be driven by remittances, which outweigh migration costs and increase household income.

Annotation.

We examine the correlates of aspirations of rural women around income, asset ownership, social status and the education of their children, using primary data from India. We then investigate how the gaps between current and aspired-to status are associated with individual investments in financial, social status-related, and educational dimensions.