Table 1.

Parents’ Aspirations for Their Children. Panel A shows means and standard deviations (denoted in brackets) in never reserved village councils of the variable in the column heading. The coefficients in panel B are OLS results for the dependent variable denoted in the column heading and measure the difference in aspirations for boys and girls relative to the never reserved sample. The row denoted Gap for never reserved village councils shows the gap in aspirations between boys and girls. The subsequent "Difference in Gap" rows show the gap in aspirations for boys and girls relative to the gap in the never reserved sample. For example, the last number in column 5 says that the gap in overall aspirations for girls versus boys has shrunk by 0.136 standard deviations (more than 25%) in twice reserved village councils relative to never reserved ones. Standard errors corrected for heteroskedasticity and clustering at the village council level are shown below the coefficients in parentheses. The sample size is 6140. The normalized average is computed across the four outcomes (columns 1–4), which are first normalized by subtracting the mean for never reserved village councils and dividing by standard deviation in the never reserved sample. All estimates control for village characteristics described in table S1 and for respondent gender.

	Does not wish child to be housewife or whatever in-laws prefer	Wishes child to have a high education job	Wishes child to marry after age 18	Wishes child to graduate or get higher education	Normalized average	Wishes child to be Pradhan
A. Means and SD in never reserved
Boys	0.991	0.068	0.992	0.318	0.329	0.688
	[0.092]	[0.252]	[0.089]	[0.466]	[0.446]	[0.463]
Girls	0.242	0.039	0.756	0.176	−0.357	0.588
	[0.429]	[0.193]	[0.430]	[0.381]	[0.654]	[0.492]
B. Coefficients
	Never Reserved
Gap	−0.747	−0.028	−0.238	−0.140	−0.684	−0.093
	(0.018)	(0.009)	(0.012)	(0.019)	(0.025)	(0.020)
	Reserved Once
Boys	−0.005	0.016	−0.004	0.003	0.013	−0.041
	(0.009)	(0.014)	(0.006)	(0.025)	(0.027)	(0.025)
Girls	−0.015	0.020	−0.021	−0.015	−0.011	0.000
	(0.023)	(0.009)	(0.014)	(0.020)	(0.031)	(0.029)
Difference in
Gap	−0.010	0.003	−0.017	−0.018	−0.024	0.041
	(0.025)	(0.015)	(0.016)	(0.026)	(0.035)	(0.029)
	Reserved Twice
Boys	−0.033	−0.012	−0.018	0.003	−0.042	0.008
	(0.018)	(0.016)	(0.010)	(0.044)	(0.039)	(0.043)
Girls	0.064	0.012	0.021	0.051	0.093	0.101
	(0.028)	(0.014)	(0.025)	(0.036)	(0.050)	(0.044)
Difference in
Gap	0.097	0.025	0.038	0.048	0.136	0.092
	(0.036)	(0.020)	(0.026)	(0.048)	(0.059)	(0.049)