Gender Quotas and Female Leadership

Despite significant advances in education and political participation, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions in politics and business across the globe. In many countries, policy-makers have responded by introducing gender quotas in politics and increasingly, many have expressed an in...

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Main Authors:	Pande, Rohini, Ford, Deanna
Language:	English
Published:	Washington, DC: World Bank 2012
Subjects:	World Development Report 2012
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9120

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spelling	okr-10986-91202021-04-23T14:02:44Z Gender Quotas and Female Leadership Pande, Rohini Ford, Deanna World Development Report 2012 Despite significant advances in education and political participation, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions in politics and business across the globe. In many countries, policy-makers have responded by introducing gender quotas in politics and increasingly, many have expressed an interest in requiring gender quotas for corporate boards. This paper reviews the evidence on the equity and efficiency impacts of gender quotas for political positions and corporate board membership. Adoption of quotas by countries is likely correlated with attitudes about women within a country. However, the randomized allocation of political quotas in India and the unanticipated introduction of board quotas in Norway have allowed researchers to provide causal analysis and this review focuses on evidence from these two settings. The Indian evidence demonstrates that quotas increase female leadership and influences policy outcomes. In addition, rather than create a backlash against women, quotas can reduce gender discrimination in the long-term. The board quota evidence is more mixed. While female entry on boards is correlated with changing management practices, this change appears to adversely influence short-run profits. Whether this is partly driven by negative perceptions of female management choices remains an open question. Returning to the broader cross-country context, we find evidence in many different settings that political and corporate entities often act strategically to circumvent the intended impact of quotas. Consistent with this, we report suggestive evidence that the design of the quota and selection systems matter for increasing female leadership. 2012-06-26T15:38:52Z 2012-06-26T15:38:52Z 2012 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9120 English CC BY 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/ World Bank Washington, DC: World Bank Africa Middle East and North Africa Latin America & Caribbean South Asia
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
language	English
topic	World Development Report 2012
spellingShingle	World Development Report 2012 Pande, Rohini Ford, Deanna Gender Quotas and Female Leadership
geographic_facet	Africa Middle East and North Africa Latin America & Caribbean South Asia
description	Despite significant advances in education and political participation, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions in politics and business across the globe. In many countries, policy-makers have responded by introducing gender quotas in politics and increasingly, many have expressed an interest in requiring gender quotas for corporate boards. This paper reviews the evidence on the equity and efficiency impacts of gender quotas for political positions and corporate board membership. Adoption of quotas by countries is likely correlated with attitudes about women within a country. However, the randomized allocation of political quotas in India and the unanticipated introduction of board quotas in Norway have allowed researchers to provide causal analysis and this review focuses on evidence from these two settings. The Indian evidence demonstrates that quotas increase female leadership and influences policy outcomes. In addition, rather than create a backlash against women, quotas can reduce gender discrimination in the long-term. The board quota evidence is more mixed. While female entry on boards is correlated with changing management practices, this change appears to adversely influence short-run profits. Whether this is partly driven by negative perceptions of female management choices remains an open question. Returning to the broader cross-country context, we find evidence in many different settings that political and corporate entities often act strategically to circumvent the intended impact of quotas. Consistent with this, we report suggestive evidence that the design of the quota and selection systems matter for increasing female leadership.
author	Pande, Rohini Ford, Deanna
author_facet	Pande, Rohini Ford, Deanna
author_sort	Pande, Rohini
title	Gender Quotas and Female Leadership
title_short	Gender Quotas and Female Leadership
title_full	Gender Quotas and Female Leadership
title_fullStr	Gender Quotas and Female Leadership
title_full_unstemmed	Gender Quotas and Female Leadership
title_sort	gender quotas and female leadership
publisher	Washington, DC: World Bank
publishDate	2012
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9120
_version_	1764408541215457280

Gender Quotas and Female Leadership

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