Ashutosh Bhuradia

College students entering the workforce are increasingly expected to collaborate and lead mixed-gender teams. Yet we know little about the interplay of gender, teamwork, and leadership especially in settings that are traditionally gender segregated. This paper examines this interplay through a 2x2 randomized field experiment involving 203 mixed gender teams in an incentivized competition at an engineering college in rural India. Students are first randomly assigned to male-majority or female-majority teams and further into one of two leadership conditions: leaders assigned based on a baseline measure of emotional intelligence or chosen by their own teammates. I find that female-majority teams that choose their own leaders outperform other groups by 0.38-0.51σ, driven by greater teamwork and more effective leadership. In contrast, male-majority teams that choose their own leaders have the lowest performance—driven by free-riding, coordination failures, and ineffective leadership—while teams with leaders assigned based on emotional intelligence, regardless of gender composition, fall somewhere in between. These results imply that leadership development and performance in teams must account for the differing dynamics across gender groups in contexts where gender norms remain strong.

Caste remains a salient dimension of inequality in India and a key target of redistributive policies. I study how misperceptions about caste disparities influence attitudes toward caste and support for redistribution through affirmative action in higher education. I first survey 774 college-aged respondents, both beneficiaries (upper-caste youth) and non-beneficiaries (lower-caste youth) of affirmative action. I find that while upper- and lower-caste youth both underestimate caste disparities, upper-caste youth underestimate disparities to a larger extent. I then randomly assign these respondents to an online intervention that provides them with factual information about caste disparities. I find that correcting misperceptions through this information improves attitudes toward lower-caste groups by 0.13σ but does not alter support for affirmative action. The results suggest that correcting misperceptions can shift social attitudes but may be insufficient to alter preferences for redistribution.

This research evaluates an 18-month STEM training initiative for first-generation women engineering students in India. Deployed nationwide by an education start-up, the program combines a women-only environment, fully online access, self-directed learning, and mentoring to address cultural, institutional, and psychological barriers to success in STEM. We assess impacts on technical and higher-order skills and longer-run labor-market outcomes. Given persistent underrepresentation of women in STEM, the study informs how targeted initiatives can break down barriers and foster inclusion in STEM education and careers.

Climate education may shape pro-environmental preferences and behaviors where children face high exposure to climate risks but few means to adapt. We test an arts-based curriculum that integrates social-emotional learning with climate education through poetry, theatre, and storytelling in a randomized trial across 110 classrooms in low-income Indian schools. The curriculum centers on air pollution as a locally salient issue and aims to make climate change personally relevant while fostering collective engagement. We estimate effects on knowledge, attitudes, individual protective actions, classroom-level public-good contributions, prosocial donations, and information-seeking about air quality, providing experimental evidence on how school-based interventions can influence environmental behavior in developing-country settings.

Educational Researcher, 51(4): 265–273 · 2022

with Prashant Loyalka, Zhaolei Shi, Guirong Li, Elena Kardanova, Igor Chirikov, Ningning Yu, Shangfeng Hu, Huan Wang, Liping Ma, Fei Guo, Lydia Liu, Saurabh Khanna, Yanyan Li, and Adam Murray

Social Science & Medicine, 276, 113846 · 2021

with Dinsha Mistree, Prashant Loyalka, Robert Fairlie, Manyu Angrish, Jason Lin, Amar Karoshi, Sara J Yen, Jamsheed Mistri, and Vafa Bayat

Nature Human Behaviour, 5 (7), 892-904 · 2021

with Prashant Loyalka, Ou Lydia Liu, Guirong Li, Elena Kardanova, Igor Chirikov, Shangfeng Hu, Ningning Yu, Liping Ma, Fei Guo, Tara Beteille, Namrata Tognatta, Lin Gu, Guangming Ling, Denis Federiakin, Huan Wang, Saurabh Khanna, Zhaolei Shi, and Yanyan Li

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia, pp. 1107–1126. Singapore: Springer Singapore · 2021

with Tara Beteille and Prashant Loyalka

Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 43(2): 198–213 · 2020

with Guirong Li, Irina Shcheglova, Yanyan Li, Prashant Loyalka, Olivia Zhou, Shangfeng Hu, Ningning Yu, Liping Ma, Fei Guo, and Igor Chirikov

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(14): 6732–6736 · 2019

with Prashant Loyalka, Ou Lydia Liu, Guirong Li, Igor Chirikov, Elena Kardanova, Lin Gu, Guangming Ling, Ningning Yu, Fei Guo, Liping Ma, Shangfeng Hu, Angela S. Johnson, Saurabh Khanna, Isak Froumin, Jing Shi, P.K. Choudhury, Tara Beteille, Francisco Marmolejo, and Namrata Tognatta