Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India

By Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, P. Topalova. Science, 2012

1,153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Girl Power The potential of affirmative action policies to reduce overall outcomes because of lower individual performance has been discussed widely and at length. But do quotas or preferential treatment of applicants alter the pool of candidates? Balafoutas and Sutter (p. 579; see the Perspective by Villeval) used an existing laboratory-based task to assess the change in composition of winning candidates and the overall outcome as a function of three affirmative action policies. Policies designed to encourage more women to enter a competitive environment served to recruit enough high-performing individuals to ensure that the efficiency in performing the task was preserved. Beaman et al. (p. 582, published online 12 January) examined the effects of a constitutionally mandated reservation of village-council and council-leader positions for women in West Bengal after two election cycles (1998 and 2003). The program appeared to narrow the gender gap in aspirations of parents for their children and of children for themselves; in addition, teenage girls spent more time in school and less on household chores. Beliefs and attitudes changed only after the second set of elections—that is, after a longer exposure to female role models—complementing the more rapid policy changes instituted by women council leaders after the first round of elections. The effects of female leaders on girls occur via policy changes in the short run and parental aspirations in the longer run. Exploiting a randomized natural experiment in India, we show that female leadership influences adolescent girls’ career aspirations and educational attainment. A 1993 law reserved leadership positions for women in randomly selected village councils. Using 8453 surveys of adolescents aged 11 to 15 and their parents in 495 villages, we found that, relative to villages in which such positions were never reserved, the gender gap in aspirations closed by 20% in parents and 32% in adolescents in villages assigned a female leader for two election cycles. The gender gap in adolescent educational attainment was erased, and girls spent less time on household chores. We found no evidence of changes in young women’s labor market opportunities, which suggests that the impact of women leaders primarily reflects a role model effect.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41f8dfaea58a72ea9c3fb955dd9dc672dbfae02f

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Citations in the corpus

Political Reservations and Women's Entrepreneurship in India (2013, positive): “Beaman et al. (2009, 2012) show how perceptions of women improve once men are exposed to women in leadership roles, providing substantial evidence of the framework regarding attitudes and bias implicit in Hoff and Stiglitz (2010).”
Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being and Their Relationships with Gender Equality (2014, background): “…2012; Sapienza et al. 2009; Van Vugt 2009), and in consequence are inclined to tolerate them, others are experimenting with methods for making women more competitive, enabling them to succeed in traditionally male-dominated careers (Balafoutas and Sutter 2012; Beaman et al. 2012; Villeval 2012).”
Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership (2016, positive): “Still others examine the symbolic effects of quotas, including their impact on women’s career ambitions (Beaman et al. 2012) and political participation and engagement (Barnes and Burchard 2013; Clayton 2015; Kittilson and Schwindt-Bayer 2012), as well as beliefs about women’s ability to govern…”
Women Empowerment and Economic Development (2012, background): “In West Bengal, where women complained more often than men about water and roads, reserved councils invested more in water and roads.”
Effects of role models and gender on students’ entrepreneurial intentions (2014, background): “Gender-matched role models can presumably help break negative career stereotypes (Beaman et al., 2012).”
The Future in Mind: Aspirations and Forward-Looking Behaviour in Rural Ethiopia (2014, background): “Beaman et al. (2012) find that, when Indian villages were randomly assigned to reserve a seat on the village council for a woman and girls had female role models in leadership positions, the gender gap in occupational aspirations declined among girls themselves and among parents.”
Aspirations: An Approach to Measurement with Validation Using Ethiopian Data (2014, methodology): “the intertwined relationship between aspirations and poverty (e.g., Macours and Vakis, 2009; Bernard et al., 2011; Beaman et al., 2012).”