Why do some marginalized groups, such as women, fail to seize promising opportunities? While much of the existing work has focused on external factors that directly limit individuals’ choices, a growing body of research shows that psychological constraints can independently affect investment decisions (Ashraf et al., 2022; Kaur et al al., 2025; Orkin et al., 2024). Development interventions are responding to this insight by increasing their focus on people’s perception of what they are capable of and, ultimately, their goals and aspirations. But as economic opportunities expand, do these psychological interventions remain as effective? My job market paper explores this question through an RCT in 66 rural villages in Myanmar — a country with a long and recent history of civil conflict and conservative gender attitudes.

Aspirations and empowerment

Aspirations are forward-looking goals that shape our perceptions of the possibilities for our own lives, influencing how we process information and make decisions. The formation of aspirations is an intrinsically social process (Genicot and Ray, 2017, 2020; Ray, 2006): we form comparisons to similar peers to access information on available opportunities and whether and how we can pursue them successfully.

While aspirations can be a powerful force for upward mobility, they can also trap individuals in cycles of low ambition and limited investment that reinforce poverty. Disadvantaged groups, such as women, are particularly vulnerable, as they may struggle to develop a “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai, 2004). They face institutions or norms that may discourage them from pursuing long-term goals and are less likely to encounter role models who can inspire them to aspire higher. The absence of role models may also mean a lack of a blueprint for turning goals into concrete, forward-looking plans (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006).

Conditional on having a plan, one must also have the agency to pursue it. In many developing countries, women report much lower freedom of choice and control over their lives than men (Jayachandran, 2015). Women’s limited agency often spans multiple domains and has direct implications for their capacity to pursue ambitious goals. This raises important questions about how their aspirations are formed and managed under agency constraints.

Using the baseline data (N=1155) from our RCT, I provide novel evidence on the relationship between women’s empowerment and aspirations. To do so, I construct two indices to capture these concepts, following Anderson (2008):

- Empowerment index: captures key factors for women’s ability to pursue goals, such as financial access, business self-efficacy, control over income decisions, control over household assets, and beliefs about gender roles.

- Aspirations index: includes aspirations on domains that are intuitively linked to life improvements, such as income, children’s education, and access to energy services (lighting, electric cooking, and productive appliances — each mapped to the Multi-Tier Framework scale).

While both empowerment and aspirations appear to be increasing functions of wealth, the relationship between the two is much more complex: aspirations are an S-shape function of empowerment (Figure 1). Aspirations appear largely unresponsive to empowerment gains in the lower half of the distribution but, as empowerment grows and crosses the sample mean, the relationship turns steeply positive.

Figure 1

This pattern suggests that marginalized groups facing societal constraints may engage in what Genicot and Ray (2020) call aspirations management  — adjusting their goals to a level they believe they can realistically achieve. A complementary interpretation is that some women pursue “consolation prizes”, such as being a good housewife or other goals that, while socially valued, are inconsistent with the empowerment gains required for the pursuit of more ambitious goals that might challenge existing norms. Overall, these findings provide a new perspective on how empowerment may constrain women's long-run outcomes.

The experiment

We conducted an RCT to study how psychological constraints affect women’s goal-setting and investment behavior in rural Myanmar. The study included 33 villages powered by solar mini-grids and 33 unelectrified villages across two regions (Ayeyarwady and Tanintharyi). To test whether the effects of the intervention differed across different opportunity environments, we stratified our village-level randomization by region and electrification status.

Broadly following a design by Orkin et al. (2024), the treatment combined edutainment with a goal-setting workshop. First, women were exposed to a story that featured a female role model pursuing aspirational but attainable goals linked to productive investments in her business. Second, women took part in a series of guided visualization, goal-setting, and planning exercises that mirrored behaviors demonstrated by the role model. Together, these components aimed to expand women’s sense of what is possible within their circumstances and to equip them with concrete tools to pursue related goals.

Results and discussion

The treatment increased women’s business self-efficacy (0.29 SDs relative to placebo) and financial empowerment (0.28 SDs) — improving their perceived ability to identify business opportunities and raising the share of women who reported having their own savings, banking, and mobile money account. The results are driven by less empowered women at baseline, who also improved their beliefs about gender roles. We find no difference on the empowerment effects by village electrification status.

Effects on aspirations were concentrated in unelectrified villages (Figure 2), with positive impacts on a novel measure of aspirations for productive appliances (30.8% of the placebo mean) and strong impacts on aspirations for children's education (2 additional years). We attribute this heterogeneity across village types to differences in the opportunity environment that affect how responsive aspirations are to the education-focused role model story.

Figure 2

First, solar villages tend to have a higher number of schools and better overall infrastructure compared to unelectrified villages. While this may increase access to higher education, it also expands economic opportunities that do not depend on it. Households in solar villages were 20.4% more likely to own productive appliances and 12.7% more likely to be engaged in non-agricultural business activity. On the flip side, a lower ability to leverage electricity for productive uses, including business, increases the relative value of schooling as pathway out of poverty in unelectrified villages.

Second, the easier potential path to higher education in solar villages also makes it more likely that someone in your social environment will have pursued related goals. When real-life role models are more common, aspirations are more established and an external narrative highlighting educational pathways contributes little new information.

The effects on aspirations in unelectrified villages are driven by the more empowered and educated women at baseline, again highlighting empowerment’s role in the calibration of aspirations. Consistent with the shift in aspirations, we also see parallel increases in education expenditures, the time women spend on childcare, and the probability that households took out a business loan in these sites.

Policy implications

Our treatment was highly successful at raising women’s business and financial empowerment — the dimensions that were most salient in the role model story. This suggest that women’s entrepreneurial training could be augmented with edutainment and mutually-reinforcing visualization and planning exercises to enhance participants’ ability to pursue goals and promote better entrepreneurial outcomes.

The findings also show that aspirations-based interventions do not operate in a vacuum: they interact with the economic environment and are most effective when they provide relevant role models for pathways such as education, which are particularly valuable where other investment opportunities, including productive uses of electricity, are constrained. This highlights the importance of adapting the design of such interventions as economic conditions evolve to ensure that they remain locally-relevant and continue to create the behavioral incentives needed for productive investments that can raise living standards.

About the Author

Ferran Vega Carol is a  Public Policy (Economics) PhD Candidate at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

His work at the intersection of development, gender, energy, and behavioral economics. To learn more about his research, visit: https://sites.google.com/view/ferranvegacarol

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