As part of Columbia University's Spring 2026 Development Workshop, Rohini Pande will present "Phones, Permissions and Pushback: Experimental Evidence on Women's Digital Autonomy in Rural India" at the Development Seminar.
We augmented an Indian state-funded smartphone distribution campaign for women initiative with a randomized intervention across 212 villages that provided digital literacy training and a norm-compliant information service, randomly treating a majority or minority of women in treated village. Two years following training, there are significant gains in smartphone usage, social interaction, and mental health, as well as a liberalization of women's beliefs around gender-appropriate phone use. However, in comparison to low saturation villages, where roughly one-sixth of women were treated, all of these gains are significantly attenuated in high-saturation villages, where the majority of women were treated. In high-saturation villages, there is evidence of male behavioral backlash --- increased gatekeeping of women's phone access --- even as their own beliefs liberalize. Saturation penalty loads on male baseline conservatism, not female attitudes, and spillovers to untreated women indicate village-level enforcement. The findings highlight a fundamental tension: scaling norm-challenging interventions can lead to enforcement responses that contradict desired behavior change.
