The Effect of the Narrator’s Gender and Profession on Push-Call Engagement
ETH -19 -1577Last modified on January 27th, 2026 at 9:00 am
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Abstract
PxD is partnering with Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to help improve the effectiveness of their voice-based mobile-phone advisory service, the 8028 hotline, by conducting continuous iterations and experiments, as well as by making suggestions for improvements to and customization of the service. The service has millions of registered farmers and represents the first in Africa to be maintained by a government entity at such a large scale.
Historically, the 8028 farmers’ hotline content has been narrated by a female journalist. PxD designed this experiment to test whether variation in the narrator’s voice in terms of gender and profession influences farmers’ engagement with the 8028 hotline. The sample comprised 25,357 farmers who were 8028 users. According to registration information, women make up less than 25% of 8028 users. Each farmer was randomly allocated to the control group or one of the three treatment arms. The farmers received a series of push calls to provide information relevant to their crop and location. The four experimental arms were: female journalist (control), male journalist, female agronomist, and male agronomist.
Using administrative data from 424,964 calls over a two-year period, we found that, overall, the female agronomist narrator generated the strongest listening outcomes but the weakest pick-up rates, while the male agronomist narrator generated the highest pick-up rates but substantially lower listening rates once calls were answered. -
Status
Completed
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Start date
Q2 Jun 2019
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Experiment Location
Ethiopia
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Partner Organization
Ethiopian ATA
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Agricultural season
_N/A
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Experiment type
A/B test
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Sample frame / target population
8028 hotline users
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Sample size
25,357
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Outcome type
Service engagement, Information access
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Mode of data collection
PxD administrative data
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Research question(s)
Does variation in the narrator's gender (female or male) and profession (journalist or agronomist) influence advisory call pick-up and listening rates?
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Research theme
Communication technology, Gender, Message narration
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Research Design
The sample comprised 25,357 farmers registered for the 8028 service. Each farmer was randomly allocated to one of the four treatment arms, and received a series of push calls to provide information relevant to the farmer’s crop and location.
The four experimental arms for varying the voice of the narrator were: female journalist (control group), male journalist, female agronomist, and male agronomist.
We measured engagement outcomes using administrative data. The pick-up rate was defined as the proportion of farmers who picked up the phone, and the listening rate was defined as the proportion of the call duration to the total length of the content.
This experiment ran from June to August 2019, and April 2021 to May 2023 with around 20 calls per farmer scheduled during this time period. During this time period, 424,964 calls were used for the analysis.
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Results
Calls narrated by a female agronomist achieved the highest average listening rate, with farmers listening to 77.5% of messages. This is 0.8 percentage points (pp) higher than the control group of a female journalist narrator (76.7%; p < 0.05). By contrast, farmers assigned to the male agronomist narrator listened to 16.4 pp less of the calls on average than those in the female journalist control group (p < 0.01), which indicates substantially lower engagement with message content. There was no statistically significant difference in the listening rates of farmers assigned to the male agronomist group and the control group.
Pick-up rates showed a different pattern. Farmers in the male agronomist group answered the highest number of calls during the implementation period (7.35 calls on average compared to 7.18 calls in the female journalist control group; p < 0.01). Farmers assigned to the female agronomist group answered 1.02 fewer calls on average, and those assigned to the male agronomist group answered 0.45 fewer calls, relative to the control group (both p < 0.01).
Overall, the female agronomist narrator generated the strongest listening outcomes but the weakest pick-up rates, while the male agronomist narrator generated the highest pick-up rates but substantially lower listening rates once calls were answered.