The challenge
Villagers in India who had never been required to have a female leader preferred male leaders and perceived hypothetical female leaders as less effective than male ones, even when stated performance was identical.
The case
A 1993 law reserved leadership positions for women in randomly selected village councils; since the mid-1990s one third of village council head positions have been randomly reserved, so that only women could be elected head. Using data on 265 village councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo showed that reservation affected the types of public goods provided: leaders invested more in infrastructure directly relevant to the needs of their own gender, and in West Bengal women were more likely to participate in policy-making when their council leader was a woman. Lori Beaman and colleagues found that exposure to a female leader weakened stereotypes about gender roles and eliminated male villagers' negative bias in how female leaders' effectiveness was perceived, and that after 10 years of the policy, women were more likely to stand for and win unreserved seats in villages continuously required to have a female leader. In a further study of 8,453 adolescents and their parents in 495 villages, the gender gap in aspirations closed by 20% among parents and 32% among adolescents in villages assigned a female leader for two election cycles, and the gender gap in adolescents' educational attainment was erased. Separately, using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, Lakshmi Iyer, Anandi Mani, Prachi Mishra and Petia Topalova found that an increase in female representation in local government induced a large and significant rise in documented crimes against women, which they say is driven primarily by greater reporting rather than greater incidence, with no increase in crimes against men.
Why it worked
The researchers attribute the aspiration effects primarily to a role model effect, since they found no change in young women's labour market opportunities; attitudes shifted only after longer exposure, as villagers rated women leaders less effective after a first exposure but not a second.
Sources
- Chattopadhyay, R., & Duflo, E. (2004). Women as policy makers: Evidence from a randomized policy experiment in India. Econometrica, 72(5), 1409–1443.
- Chattopadhyay, R., & Duflo, E. (2001). Women as policy makers: Evidence from a India-wide randomized policy experiment. NBER Working Paper 8615.
- Beaman, L., Chattopadhyay, R., Duflo, E., Pande, R., & Topalova, P. (2009). Powerful women: Does exposure reduce bias? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124(4), 1497–1540.
- Beaman, L., Duflo, E., Pande, R., & Topalova, P. (2012). Female leadership raises aspirations and educational attainment for girls: A policy experiment in India. Science, 335(6068), 582–586.
- Iyer, L., Mani, A., Mishra, P., & Topalova, P. (2012). The power of political voice: Women's political representation and crime in India. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 4(4), 165–193.
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