Stimuli and procedure
MAY
Participants were randomly assigned to the treatment condition or the control condition. Participants in both conditions received a personalized email invitation from the Status of Women Council of the NWT inviting them to attend a 10-minute online briefing session on gender equity and policy. The email invitation for the treatment condition contained two personal stories highlighting the disproportionate impact of policies for two women. The email invitation for the control condition did not contain personal stories. To maximize attendance, all invitations contained a link to a Doodle poll, where participants could indicate their choice of a briefing session from a list of five alternate dates and times if they couldn’t make the briefing on the default date. See SI briefing email invitation in the control and treatment conditions.The study ran for a total of three weeks from April 21 to May 13, 2022. Email invitations were sent to both groups on April 21, 2022 with three email reminders sent over the subsequent two weeks for both groups. The briefing session was a 10-minute presentation on gender equity in policymaking run by the Status of Women Council of the NWT. The briefing was identical in both conditions except that the briefing in the treatment condition contained personal stories (as in the email invitation). See SI for the briefing slides. The briefing was pre-recorded to ensure that all participants in a given condition were given the same information. All questions and comments from the participants were recorded and responded to with a scripted response indicating that they would be contacted with a personal follow-up after the briefing to answer their questions. Attendance reports were generated over Zoom and cross-checked against the participant list, to keep track of who attended the briefing in each condition.At the end of each briefing, participants in both conditions were sent a link to a website (