POL 1004
Introduction to Indian politics
Rahul Verma
Spring 2025, Week 7
Gender and Politics
• Gender influences political participation and policymaking.
• Shapes/affects how societies are governed and how rights are
distributed.
• Primordial perspectives - gender roles are biologically determined.
• Constructivist approaches view gender as a socially constructed identity
shaped by cultural norms, rather than biological traits.
The Gender
Gap
• A deeply patriarchal society
• Women are treated unequally:
Sex ratios at birth, unequal
education, and fewer
opportunities for women
• The gender gap is also present
in other settings: labour force,
bureaucracy, politics, and so on.
Sex Ratio: The Good, the Bad, and
the Ugly?
Mothers’ Education-level & Child
Sex Ratio
Female Literacy and Sex Ratio
Female Labour Force Participation
Rates
• Cultural norms can have significant effects.
Norms and • For instance, women in rural areas often report eating
Decision-Making after men. When household income is limited, this
results in women having higher rates of
Powers undernourishment.
• Decision-making power within household improving,
pace slow.
Gender and Political Representation
• Women tend to be more educated, have
cleaner criminal records than men. Yet, they
make up less than 10% of the elected
politicians at the national level in India.
• This could be because studies in other
settings (US) show that the women who do
run for office need to be much more qualified
than men to overcome biases amongst voters
(Anzia and Berry 2011).
• Some countries like Rwanda, which have
implemented gender quota laws, have seen
significant shifts in in public policy,
particularly in areas such as healthcare,
education, and social welfare.
Quota for Women?
• Reservation in National and State Legislature
• The Women's Reservation Bill was initially introduced in the parliament on September 12, 1996
• A BJP led coalition (1998, 1999) pushed for the bill in Lok Sabha but it still wasn't passed, where it
was opposed by OBC and Muslim politicians
• 2008: The UPA-I government, led by Congress, again introduced the bill to reserve seats for
women in Lok Sabha and legislative assemblies in May
• After its reintroduction, the bill was passed by Rajya Sabha on March 9, 2010, and pending in Lok
Sabha.
• Passed in August 2023. Implementation strategy not clear though.
• Impact of Reservations in Rural and Urban Local Bodies
• Different preferences - Chattopadhyay and Dufflo 2004
• More women are mobilized to vote – Goyal, 2020
• Creates a pipeline of elected representative - Bhavnani 2009
Women as Policy Makers?
• Two districts - one each from West
Bengal and Rajasthan
• Random selection & Balance tests
(there are no differences between
reserved and unreserved GPs that could
influence our estimates)
• Table 2 of the paper shows that the
mean of reserved and unreserved
villages is the same or villages with
women leaders were similar to villages
without women leaders prior to their
assignment to gender quotas
Bureaucracy and Female Politicians?
• Low representation of women has severe implications. While the proportion of
female has improved significantly in elite-bureaucracy, still remains low.
• James Manor provides evidence on how male councillors conspire with
male panchayat secretaries and other local officials to deny relevant pieces of
information to women councillors.
• This kind of collusion severely undermines the capacity of women representatives
to perform well and exert influence.
• Bhumi Purohit has shown that women sarpanches find it more challenging to
engage with the state due to the biased behaviour of male bureaucrats who
assume that women politicians have limited understanding of how to operate the
system.
Gender Gap in Knowledge
Study Design
• Leverage the arbitrary geographic
boundary used for SHG implementation
to identify the effect of women’s groups
on political participation across 152
villages in Madhya Pradesh.
• Control villages were selected via pair-
matching on observables to further
ensure continuity across the boundary
Strengths in
Numbers?
• Participation in SHG groups had a
significant and substantial impact on
women's political participation.
• Women’s attendance at public meetings
doubled.
• SHGs increase women’s political
participation by
• increasing their networks
• stimulating group-based collective action,
• increasing civics skills.
Green shoots?