There is an old paper, well-cited, that documents a striking finding from rural India. When cable television arrived in a village, women in that village reported lower son preference, more autonomy in household decisions, and less acceptance of intimate partner violence. Cable was the treatment; the outcomes were gender-attitude scales. The paper is now twenty years old.
The paper is not wrong. Cable television did carry that signal, at that moment, in that village, when watching cable marked you out as someone whose household had chosen to bring the outside world in.
What we wanted to test — with a co-author, in a small triadic pilot — is whether the medium that carries that signal is still cable, or whether it has moved to the phone in the young woman’s hand.
The design
The pilot design was triadic. In 115 rural households, we interviewed three women — the grandmother, the mother, and the eldest unmarried daughter — separately, in the same visit. The interviews used the same core instrument on gender attitudes: son preference, decision autonomy, acceptance of wife-beating, and daily media use.
Separately matters. A woman answering questions on son preference in a room with her mother-in-law will report the community average. A daughter answering in the room with her mother will edit. The instrument was administered one woman at a time, in a screened corner where possible, by an enumerator matched on caste and language.
We were interested in three things. First, the raw generational difference in gender attitudes. Second, the media that each generation actually uses in a day. Third, the association between the two — whether the media a woman uses tracks the attitudes she holds.
What the numbers said
Daily social media use ran at eighty percent among daughters. It ran at two percent among grandmothers. The mothers sat in the middle, at forty-six percent, with a wider spread by household income than any other cohort.
Television, for the first time in one of these instruments, did not point in one direction on the attitude scales. It correlated positively with some outcomes, negatively with others, and had no significant effect on most. Cable was no longer a treatment; it was just background.
Daughters who used social media daily reported markedly lower son preference — six points on the scale, with a confidence interval that stayed comfortably on the good side of zero. Each additional platform a mother used tracked with about eight points more say in household economic decisions, a linear effect across zero to four platforms.
The finding that will get quoted is that one. The finding that unsettled us was the other one.
Nothing moved acceptance of wife-beating. In any generation, on any medium, at any level of daily use. Son preference and decision autonomy responded to the smartphone the way the paper suggests they once responded to cable. Wife-beating did not. The bar for what shifts that attitude appears to be higher than exposure to a new medium.
What we are not saying
We are not saying the smartphone causes lower son preference. Triadic pilots do not do causal identification; that is not what they are for. What the pilot does is generate the priors and the sampling frame for a larger, longer, differently-designed study.
We are also not saying cable no longer matters. Cable’s era of being the marker is what has ended. It is now just one more piece of ambient signal, competing with the phone for the same attention window. In a village where a fourteen-year-old girl has a Reels feed personalised to her, the marginal information that cable delivers has to work much harder to be new.
Why we are writing this up
Two reasons.
One, the twenty-year-old finding has been imported into policy design for a while. Programmes designed on the assumption that television is the medium of gender-attitude change will be optimising against the wrong screen if the phone has taken over the signal. Getting the medium right matters for the intervention.
Two, the wife-beating finding is a puzzle worth naming. If the medium of gender attitudes has moved, but the medium of intimate partner violence acceptance has not, then either the two attitudes are made of different stuff — or the media that moves the second one is not in our instrument. We do not know which, and the paper we are writing for EPW says exactly that.
If you have a village where the pilot’s finding would fail — a place where cable still marks you out, or where the phone has not arrived — write in. Contradictions are the whole reason to write up a pilot before the full trial.