Affiliate Spotlight: Danila Serra on women in science and leadership

In celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11, 2025, J-PAL Africa hosted an Ask Me Anything session with J-PAL affiliated professor Danila Serra on X, formerly Twitter. Below, we share highlights from this engaging conversation about her research on gender equality in education and economic opportunities.

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Danila Serra is an Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. As an applied economist, she employs experimental methods to address policy-relevant questions across three primary research areas: political economy, economics of education, and development economics with a focus on gender disparities. Her work includes innovative studies on the impact of role models on educational choices, interventions to diversify fields dominated by men, and promoting women's leadership in low-income countries.

During our Ask Me Anything session, Serra responded to questions about promoting gender equality in education and economics using insights from her recent research. Below are highlights from this conversation.

Role models and educational choices

Your work highlights the impact of role models on women's educational choices. How can institutions practically leverage this insight to encourage more women to pursue STEM fields?

Role model interventions are quite inexpensive. Schools already have career fairs or classroom visits by professionals discussing their jobs. However, STEM representatives tend to be gender-representative, meaning they're usually men.

Evidence on the importance of gender-matching for role model impacts suggests that having successful women in STEM engage in activities like career fairs, classroom visits, and science experiments, may significantly impact young girls' aspirations and interest in STEM careers. This effect occurs because women are more likely to be influenced by women role models due to relatability and inspiration.

In the longer term, as fields become more gender-equal, having more women teachers in secondary and post-secondary STEM courses would also help attract more women into these fields, as supported by research.

Do you see a role for men economists or men role models to contribute to shifting gender norms in economics and other fields dominated by men?

Men role models certainly exist and can influence girls' and women's educational and career choices. However, recent research indicates that gender matching does matter—women respond more to women role models.

Role models can impact others by:

• Providing information
• Being inspirational, inspiring others to follow their path
• Explaining how they overcame challenges and reached their goals

Men role models can be effective in providing information and inspiration, but being able to relate to the role model is very important for the inspirational aspect and for learning how to overcome challenges. The challenges experienced by men and women pursuing careers in STEM are likely different, and interacting with successful women role models is less common due to these fields being traditionally men-dominated.

These factors contribute to women being more likely to be "inspired" by women who are successful in STEM.

What do we know about the long-term career trajectories of women who are influenced by role models? Are they more likely to enter leadership positions or high-paying sectors within economics?

Understanding the long-term impacts of role models is very important. Since these types of interventions are quite recent (past 8–10 years) and they target high school students or first-year college students, there hasn't been much time to follow the study participants and assess labor market impacts.

I conducted a role model study with Catherine Porter in 2015–2016, involving primarily freshmen in college. Study participants most likely graduated from college by 2022. My coauthor and I are currently collecting data to assess the impact of the role model intervention on labor market outcomes. I am sure that interesting studies on this are being written right now!

In general, long-term assessments may be difficult to conduct, since education data are often de-identified. It may not be possible to link individual-level data collected in school to out-of-school information.

Using social media to inspire educational choices

Could you provide more details about your Instagram reel study? What were the main findings, and was it successful in both increasing interest and enrollment?

We are currently carefully analyzing the data from our intervention in Peru, which consisted of creating an Instagram account called "My days at Uni" (in Spanish) and encouraging young women in their last year of high school to follow the account and engage with videos posted by current engineering students over a six-week period.

Some videos were short fun reels about studying engineering and being inspired by successful women in science. Others were "tours" of university classrooms and snapshots of "life in college" studying engineering. They were all uplifting and inspirational.

In some schools, we also shared informational videos with head teachers via WhatsApp, aimed at changing gender stereotypes linked to engineering. Our preliminary results from this small sample (800 students, about 600 women) show the following:

• The short-term survey data did not show an immediate increase in interest in engineering.
• There was a positive impact on scholarship applications among women who performed in the top 20 percent in math.
• Administrative data indicated a positive, though not statistically significant, impact on engineering major selection among top-performing women in math.
• Most importantly, we observed a large and positive impact on all women's likelihood to be enrolled in college a year later.

While our current sample may be too small to fully identify the impact on women's decision to major in engineering specifically, the Instagram intervention increased overall interest in and enrollment in college among women, possibly by making the college experience more relatable.

We're currently working on scaling up the intervention to involve schools across the country, conditional on funding. I'm excited about this project and believe there's significant potential in using Instagram and other social media platforms to more effectively reach young women.

Women's leadership in savings groups

In your study on women's leadership in savings groups what were some of the most surprising findings from this work? When is the full paper coming out?

We started the project wondering about the impact of women leadership appointed Chairperson in Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) role in Northern Uganda, and the extent to which they would be respected and possibly re-appointed by group members. We had no answers from previous studies and couldn't find similar interventions or natural experiments in the context of VSLAs—which tend to have men in leadership roles, despite the majority of members being women.

Our intervention proved very effective in promoting women's leadership in VSLAs not only in the cycle when the intervention occurred but also in the following one. This means that the intervention did not lead to just a temporary increase in the number of women leaders, which was great to see in the data.

We also found important results on women's effectiveness as leaders:

• Women were as effective as men in terms of VSLAs' financial viability.
• As Chairpersons, women tended to lend more to women than men Chairpersons do, reducing gender inequality observed in members' loans.
• Women were confident in their performance as Chairperson and didn’t suffer from backlash from members (we had a survey measure of mental health).
• The level of member satisfaction with women Chairpersons was not lower than satisfaction with men Chairpersons.

These are all very reassuring findings, which are even better than what we expected. Women can be effective leaders in VSLAs. We should have a paper ready for circulation in the next couple of months.