Aletheia Donald (Senior Economist, Africa Gender Innovation Lab, World Bank) presented Whose Job Is it? Implicit Gender Bias Toward Occupations in India and Uganda at the Economic Research and Development Impact Department (ERDI) Seminar Series at the Asian Development Bank on November 13, 2025. The virtual seminar explored how implicit attitudes toward gendered occupational choices can be measured in low- and middle-income country contexts.
The research adapts the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) for use in large-scale field surveys, deploying it for the first time in development settings with women and men across India and Uganda. Respondents viewed occupational primes depicting gender-congruent or incongruent workers followed by neutral images, then rated the images' pleasantness. The study found that 44% of respondents in India and 54% in Uganda showed some degree of bias, with respondents 4.4 percentage points less likely to rate an image as pleasant following gender-incongruent versus gender-congruent primes. The strongest effects appeared for care work occupations such as homemaker and babysitter, and manual labor roles like roofer and miner.
Cross-country patterns aligned with regional labor force characteristics. The research also found that respondents' implicit bias was associated with whether they themselves worked in a gender-congruous sector, though this relationship differed across countries and by respondent gender. The findings validate a scalable tool for measuring implicit occupational bias in development contexts and reveal how bias patterns reflect local labor market realities, with implications for both gender-related measurement and policy.
International Food Policy Research Institute