A few months ago, health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad had remarked that providing TV sets to households can have a positive effect on population control. Turns out that Azad hit the bull?s eye. Economic research shows that turning on the TV can be a simple yet influential way of improving a woman?s standing in rural India.

Beyond providing entertainment, television vastly increases both the availability of information about the outside world and exposure to other ways of life. Anthropological accounts suggest that the growth of TV in rural areas has had significant effects on a wide range of day-to-day lifestyle behaviours, including latrine building and fan usage. Unlike anthropological studies, where causal effects of TV ownership are hard to document, recent research in economics provides evidence of the causal effect of the introduction of cable TV in rural areas of India on attitudes towards and discrimination against women. Emily Oster of the University of Chicago and Robert Jensen of the University of California, Los Angeles, find in their study The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women?s Status in India that the introduction of cable TV in India had a significant positive effect on various measures of women?s status in India.

In a 1992 article, Amartya Sen argued that India had 41 million ?missing women??women and girls who died prematurely due to mistreatment resulting from a dramatically male-biased population. The population bias towards men has only gotten worse in the last two decades as sex-selective abortion has been more widely used to avoid female births. More broadly, girls are discriminated against in nutrition, medical care, vaccination and education. Also, gender inequality is significantly worse in rural than in urban areas.

The advent of cable TV in the 1990s seems to have had a positive effect on mitigating these social ills. While television was first introduced to India in 1959, for the first three decades, all broadcasting was regulated by the government. The most significant innovation in terms of both content and viewership was the introduction of satellite TV in the early 1990s. In the five years from 2001 to 2006, about 30 million households, representing approximately 150 million individuals, added cable service. Jensen and Oster examine the effect of this change.

Soap operas are among the most popular shows on cable: the most popular show in both 2000 and 2007 (Nielsen ratings) was Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. By virtue of the fact that the most popular Indian serials take place in urban settings, women depicted on these shows are typically much more emancipated than rural women. Characters in the popular soap operas have more education, marry late, and have smaller families?all things rarely found in rural areas; and many female characters work outside the home, sometimes as professionals, running businesses or in other positions of authority. By exposing rural households to urban attitudes and values, cable and satellite TV may lead to improvements in status for rural women. It is this possibility that Jensen and Oster explore by examining the effect of the introduction of cable and satellite TV in India on a variety of measures of women?s status: autonomy, attitudes towards spousal abuse, son preference and fertility. In addition, they explore the effects on education for children, which some authors have argued will increase when the status of women is higher.

The authors use several measures of the status of women. They begin with attitudes towards beating and son preference. Attitudes towards spousal abuse were measured by asking women whether beating is acceptable in six possible situations (if a woman neglects children, is unfaithful, etc), and counting the total number of situations in which she reports beating is acceptable. Son preference was measured by asking women who want more children whether they want their next child to be a boy. Jensen and Oster found large effects of the introduction of cable television on both of these variables. Women who live in villages that have introduced cable TV see large declines in both the number of acceptable beating situations and son preference; villages that haven?t introduced cable TV see no change.

Indicators involving changes in actual behaviours, as opposed to attitudes, likewise suggest substantial improvement in women?s status. These include participation in household decision making, choices about obtaining healthcare, purchasing goods, etc. Consistent with the argument put forward by the health minister, the authors also found a decrease in pregnancy after cable TV introduction. All these effects are large: between 45 and 70% of the gap in attitudes and behaviours between urban and rural areas are closed by the introduction of television.

The author is an assistant professor of finance at Emory University, Atlanta, and a visiting scholar at ISB, Hyderabad