Are Female Leaders Good for Education? Evidence from India

Abstract

This paper shows that the gender of politicians affects the educational levels of individuals who grow up in the districts where these politicians are elected. Increasing female political representation by 10 percentage points increases the probability that an individual attains primary education in urban areas by 6 percentage points, which is 21% of the difference in primary education attainment between the richest and the poorest Indian states. Caste also matters, as female politicians who won seats reserved for lower castes and disadvantaged tribes are those who mainly have an effect. In addition, both the gender and caste of politicians determine who benefits more from their policies: in urban areas female politicians increase educational achievements of those of their gender and caste. A unique dataset collected on politicians in India is matched with individual data by cohort and district of residence. The political data allow the identification of close elections between women and men, which yield quasi-experimental election outcomes used to estimate the causal effect of the gender of politicians.JEL Classification: D70, H19, H40, I2, O10.

Women in Power and Power of Women: The Liberian Experience

“…These two instruments coexist and cannot easily be dissociated. The emphasis is consistent with Clots-Figueras (2012) who has advanced that the causal nexus is in the following order: the gender of politicians affects the level of education of individuals growing in quarters where such politicians are elected.…”

Health and the Political Agency of Women

“…The idea is that, in a close election, the identity of the leader can be assumed to be random. This identification strategy resembles a regression discontinuity design (as in Lee 2001, Rehavi 2003, Clots-Figueras 2007. Figure 3 shows that there is significant variation in the fraction of constituencies that had close elections between women and men in each district and electoral year by state.…”

“…Sensitivity checks on this threshold and further checks on the identification strategy are in Clots-Figueras (2007).…”

“…However, even if the outcomes of close elections can be considered as good as random, the presence of close elections between a man and a woman is not random. For this, we control for the fraction of constituencies that had close elections between women and men in both the first and second stages; see Clots-Figueras (2007), who finds that women leaders encourage primary education powering India. No previous study has analysed the effects of women's leadership on health.…”

Social Norms and Governance: The Behavioral Response to Female Leadership

“…The policy has resulted in greater investment in public goods demanded by women (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004b), resulted in improved educational attainment of children (Clots-Figueras, 2012), greater reporting of and arrests for crimes against women (Iyer et al, 2010), has increased female aspirations and educational attainment of girls (Beaman et al, 2012) and has reduced male subconscious biases about the appropriateness of women being leaders (effectively changed the social norms). However, these positive effects are not universal and might be region specific or take time to eventuate.…”