[Antiracism] information your members might be interested in

Fri Dec 16 14:12:05 EST 2005

Hello All,

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Is She Well Served If He's in Charge?

December 14, 2005
Adapted from Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 3rd Edition by 
Samuel Bowles, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosevelt, 2005

Women are underrepresented in politics around the world. For example, in 2000 less than one-seventh of members of the world's national parliamentary bodies (such as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives) were women. But does this affect the policies adopted? Does the underrepresentation of women in the legislatures of the world result in men's interests being favored?

Maybe it does not matter. If elected political leaders simply implement the wishes of the electorate, then the sex of the person elected would not matter. Of course, women might be more likely to be elected in states where the electorate favored policies that women tend to support. So there would be a correlation between the sex of political leaders and the policies they implement. But according to this view, the sex of the leader would not have any causal importance; men or women elected from the same electorate would do the same thing. 

India, the world's most populous democracy, provides a laboratory for studying whether women's underrepresentation in politics matters for policy. In 1993 the Indian constitution was amended to require that women be the heads of not less than a third of each state's local government councils. In many states the villages that were to be required to elect a woman as pradhan (as the council heads are called) were selected randomly: the first village, the fourth, the seventh, and every third village thereafter were selected from a list of all villages in the state.

A detailed study of 261 villages in the states of West Bengal and Rajasthan investigated the ways in which policies have been affected (or not affected) in the villages with newly elected female pradhans. All of the villages studied are poor and lack public services. Tap water is available in only 1 in 10 of the Rajasthan villages and 1 one in 20 of the West Bengal villages. Public health facilities are available in less than one-tenth of the villages in West Bengal and fewer than half of the villages in Rajasthan.

The researchers studied the kinds of issues raised by men and women in the meetings of the councils. In both states women complained more frequently than men about the lack of tap water. This is not surprising: wherever tap water is lacking, it is the women who have to carry water, often over quite long distances, in pots on their heads. In West Bengal, where women do most of the paid work of road maintenance, women complained more often than men about the condition of the roads. In Rajasthan, where road maintenance is shared between men and women, men often have to travel in search of work. Since men in that state could count on at least half of the road maintanence jobs, they disproportionately favored road improvements.

The councils with newly elected female pradhans adopted policies in line with the interests of women. In both West Bengal and Rajasthan they invested more in the provision of water than did the villages that were not selected to have a woman pradhan. In West Bengal the councils headed by female pradhans invested more in roads, while in Rajasthan less was invested in road improvements. 

The effects of India's 1993 constitutional amendment thus present us with some good news about democracy: who gets elected does make a difference. However, since women occupy few top political positions in most countries (including the U.S.), the news from India may not be so good. If the lessons of India's experiment hold for other countries, women's interests in most nations are less well served than are men's.

Source: Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, "Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in India" (forthcoming in Econometrica).

© 2005 Center for Popular Economics

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