India sees gains from gender quota

The use of gender quotas to achieve equal opportunity is a controversial political strategy, but one that seems to be achieving positive results in India. A new research paper co-authored by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Rohini Pande finds that the system designating female leaders for selected village councils in India has resulted in substantive gains for girls in those villages — both in terms of aspirations and educational outcomes.

“Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India” is published in the Jan. 12 issue of the journal Science.

In their research the authors analyzed data gleaned from more than 8,000 surveys of adolescents and their parents in almost 500 villages, a third of which were randomly selected to reserve a seat for a female leader, called a “Pradhan,” on the village council. The data showed that “compared to villages that were never reserved, the gender gap in aspirations closed by 25 percent in parents and 32 percent in adolescents in villages assigned to a female leader for two election cycles.”

The authors also conclude that girls raised in villages with a female Pradhan were more likely to score higher in school exams than girls from other villages, while test scores for boys remained roughly the same.

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