IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jexpos/v5y2018i03p182-194_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do Gender Quotas Really Reduce Bias? Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Southern Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Clayton, Amanda

Abstract

A well-documented policy experiment reserving seats for women village leaders in India suggests quotas decrease citizens’ gender stereotypes and increase career aspirations and educational attainment for young women and girls. But do these results generalize to cases outside of India? And how long must quotas be in place to observe the positive effects of women’s leadership? I present data from a similar policy experiment in the southern African nation of Lesotho to test whether citizens express less gender bias after 6-years of exposure to quota-elected women village representatives. Relying on surveys and data from in-field Implicit Association Tests, I find no evidence that the quota reduced average measures of citizen gender bias, although I do find weak evidence that the quota caused young women in particular to exhibit more gender-egalitarian attitudes, both explicit and implicit.

Suggested Citation

  • Clayton, Amanda, 2018. "Do Gender Quotas Really Reduce Bias? Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Southern Africa," Journal of Experimental Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(3), pages 182-194, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jexpos:v:5:y:2018:i:03:p:182-194_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2052263018000088/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Clayton, Amanda & Tang, Belinda, 2018. "How women’s incumbency affects future elections: Evidence from a policy experiment in Lesotho," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 385-393.
    2. Harris, J. Andrew & van der Windt, Peter, 2023. "Empowering women or increasing response bias? Experimental evidence from Congo," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jexpos:v:5:y:2018:i:03:p:182-194_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/xps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.