Katie Chen, MPA/ID 2025, spent her summer in Delhi, India, as a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow. She experienced a heat wave, explored her Southwest Delhi neighborhood, spent weekends traveling to other cities in India, and developed friendships with fellow badminton players at her local gym.
For 10 weeks, she worked to “acquire a richer, more vivid understanding of this beautiful country” – through both her daily life and her research internship with the Center for Social and Behavioral Change.
Working with CSBC Director of Research Dr. Sharon Barnhardt, Katie was responsible for evaluating the impact of a newly-launched CSBC social media campaign with a Bollywood actress that aimed to raise awareness about iron deficiency anemia in women and girls.
She also worked on a project with the CSBC data-collection team, heading into the field to help conduct interviews with past participants in a social enterprise program called Haqdarshak that trained women for jobs. CSBC was interested in the experiences, behaviors, and motivations of participants – women referred to as Haqdarshikas – who had been trained to provide application support for government programs.
Sitting in on the interviews was “a rewarding and insightful experience,” Katie wrote in her .
“I learned a lot by observing my CSBC colleague, who has been conducting and managing fieldwork for over a decade,” she said. She was able to watch how he introduced the survey, kept respondents engaged throughout the hour-long interviews, and navigated sensitive questions by putting respondents at ease.
“I am so grateful to have spent the summer exploring and understanding a vast, diverse country...I leave with an even stronger conviction of how multi-faceted gender issues are and how much work there is still to be done."
It was a learning experience for Katie beyond just helping her build fieldwork skills. Hesitancy among women survey respondents to speak about their experience, and a tendency to defer to men in the room to answer questions, were examples to Katie of socio-cultural norms that disempowered women.
“It made me recognize the importance of instilling confidence in women [in India],” she said, noting that the country was ranked 127th out of 146 countries in gender parity by the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report.
“Social norms and cultural expectations often discourage women from pursuing leadership roles or speaking out against injustice,” Katie wrote in her blog. “Initiatives that promote confidence-building, such as leadership training and mentorship programs, are essential to empower women and help them realize their full potential.”A theme throughout Katie’s blog was her growing understanding of “the diversity and nuances of India… [which is] far from a monolithic entity.”
“I am increasingly stunned by the vast religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity within India,” she wrote early in the summer. She also reflected that the country’s size and diversity must make effective policymaking much more difficult.
“One cannot imagine the complexities of achieving good governance, fair representation and effective politics in navigating these differences,” she said.
At the end of her summer, Katie felt she had a deeper understanding of India as a whole – as well as its issues related to gender, especially women’s safety and cultural norms around confidence and empowerment.
“I am so grateful to have spent the summer exploring and understanding a vast, diverse country about which I have been curious for so long,” she wrote in her final blog post. “I came to India to work on gender issues, and I leave with an even stronger conviction of how multi-faceted [these issues are] and how much work there is still to be done.”