We are pleased to announce that the paper “Women in Political Bodies as Policymakers” written by Thushyanthan Baskaran and Zohal Hessami  has been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics.

Abstract

We investigate how female representation impacts policymaking using the example of child care and new hand-collected data on local council elections in Bavaria. RDD estimations (mixed-gender races for last party-specific council seats) show that an additional female councilor accelerates the expansion of public child care by 40%. We also document an important nonlinearity: an additional woman accelerates the expansion of child care only in councils with few women. Council meeting minutes reveal that women can be effective in councils despite being a non-pivotal minority because they change “the conversation”.