Legislative Gender Quotas Research Articles

Are consociations bad for women? Assessing the effectiveness of gender quotas in Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia

ABSTRACT To overcome ethno-national segregation, conflict resolution practitioners have promoted consociational power-sharing. After power-sharing arrangements were instituted, to address women’s under-representation in parliaments legislated gender quotas were also introduced. Gender quotas have been adopted in many post-conflict settings, but their effects remain understudied. In this article, by combining consociationalism and gender quotas theory, and applying a feminist institutionalist analytical approach, we examine the disparate effectiveness of gender quotas in two consociations: Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia. We pair the two countries to evaluate why gender quotas have produced different outcomes and demonstrate that formal and informal institutions matter for quota effectiveness.

Gender balance in the board of directors

Globally, men occupy more board seats than women. In this article the author is dealing with the issue of legislative gender quotas, which seems to be the fastest way to achieve gender balance on the boards. Also, the “comply or explain” governance system, meaning an approach to equality when all people should be treated similarly, regardless of prejudices, preferences, or historical disadvantages, unless particular distinctions can be justified.Controversial questions of racial diversity among female directors are mentioned. The gender pay gap on corporate boards, concerning differences between pay received by men and women for comparable work. And it appears to be dependent on several factors, including whether the company is in a male dominated industry and whether the female director is married or has children.Gender diversity can play an important role in supporting innovative activity and organizational change. That’s why inclusion of female directors has a direct and positive impact on a company’s profits and risk management. Women board directors also broaden a company’s market knowledge as well as raise its profile.Researches have found that women need to hold at least three board seats to create a “critical mass,” which can lead to better financial performance. Studies suggest that enterprises need to reach a critical mass of women in top positions in order to reap the benefits of gender diversity, such as improved governance. Reaching this threshold allows a minority to exert their influence and ensure their voice is heard.Summarizing all the above, we can name the following main results of this study: There are more women on boards and more boards with women. More boards are reaching a 30 per cent critical mass of women. All-male boards are on the decline, but they still exist. The enterprise survey shows that gender balanced boards are more likely to have enhanced business outcomes compared to those with fewer women on their boards. In addition when there is gender balance on the board, the enterprise is more likely to have women in senior management and in top executive positions. Alternatives to quotas gaining popularity include “comply or explain” commitments, and rules of national stock exchange regulators. “Glass walls” are limiting women’s influence in boardrooms due to the lack of a critical mass, women’s absence from key committees, the low number of women appointed as board chairpersons, and women serving as non-executive board members.

Pathways to women’s electoral representation: the global effectiveness of legislative gender quotas over time

ABSTRACT This inquiry investigates the effectiveness of legislative gender quotas on women’s electoral representation and how it evolves over time and across countries. Using 190 countries spanning between 1947 and 2015, the findings suggest that quotas’ effectiveness is conditional on types and features, varies with time and imprinted with countries’ historical representation status. Reserved seats usher in more women when featuring high legislative thresholds and the effects are stable; Candidate quotas signal countries’ historical disadvantage but show an acceleration effect on women’s representation over time. Strong placement rules increase women’s representation, yet the effects decelerate. Strong sanctions indicate countries’ historical disadvantage, nevertheless, accelerate women’s representation over time. The interactive dynamics between time and quota types and features prove nuanced, presenting good room for policy learning and future policy design.

Why Do Young Men Oppose Gender Quotas? Group Threat and Backlash to Legislative Gender Quotas

Despite increasing efforts to implement legislative gender quotas, many countries still encounter substantial popular opposition to this policy. Previous work cannot explain why opposition to legislative gender quotas persists, particularly among young men, a group believed to be open to diversity. We develop and test a theoretical framework linking group threat to men's attitudes toward legislative gender quotas. While the salience of perceived group threat could trigger men's opposition to legislative gender quotas, we expect that this effect will be more profound among young men due to the heightened degree of economic insecurity experienced by younger generations. Using original survey experiments in South Korea, this study demonstrates the strong influence of group threat in the formation of negative attitudes toward legislative gender quotas among young men. These effects, however, are not mediated by traditional gender norms. Our findings have significant implications for the study of gender and politics and democratic representation.

Party Quotas and Gender Differences in Candidate Experience in Australia: 1987–2016

AbstractWhile previous investigations have demonstrated that legislative gender quotas can disrupt traditional recruitment networks to level women’s and men’s political experience, little is known about the impact of party quotas. Using the Australian Candidate Survey, we find that gender party quotas can help close the experience gap between male and female candidates, but also between women. Before the adoption of party quotas, Coalition female candidates had more experience than Labor female candidates. This party gap disappears along with gender gaps amongst Labor candidates after the Labor Party adopted gender quotas. We find that party quotas made little impact on the experience levels of male Labor candidates or Coalition candidates’ of both sexes. We identify the professionalisation of politics and women-centric networks as factors shaping how quotas impact candidate selection processes.

(Gender) balancing the books: how did Irish political parties respond to the first ‘gender quota’ election in 2016?

ABSTRACT This study examines how Ireland’s political parties responded to the implementation of legislative gender quotas for the first time at the 2016 Dáil election. Using a dataset that includes biographical and electoral information on all candidates for the 2007, 2011 and 2016 general elections, we assess whether the profile of candidates nominated in 2016 differed from previous elections. Although many parties ‘balanced the books’ by nominating fewer inexperienced male candidates, the evidence suggests that some parties engaged in ‘sacrificial lamb’ strategies when it came to the selection of women candidates. In 2016, women non-incumbents nominated by Fine Gael were significantly less experienced and less able to raise funds than in previous elections. In addition, women non-incumbents nominated by both Fine Gael and Labour in 2016 were significantly more likely to run non-competitive races even after controlling for party, experience, funding support and other factors. The paper concludes that political parties are not homogenous and respond differently to gender quotas depending on the available political opportunity structure (POS). In 2016, this POS was shaped by electoral context, party resources, male incumbency and resistance to gender quotas.

Women’s Descriptive Representation and Gendered Import Tax Discrimination

We identify a form of gender-based governmental discrimination that directly affects billions of women on a daily basis: the setting of import tariffs for gendered goods. These tax rates, which can differ across otherwise identical gender-specific products, often impose direct penalties on women as consumers. Comparing nearly 200,000 paired tariff rates on men’s and women’s apparel products in 167 countries between 1995 and 2015, we find that women suffer a tax penalty that varies systematically across countries. We demonstrate that in democracies, women’s presence in the legislature is associated with decreased import tax penalties on women’s goods. This finding is buttressed by a comparison of democracies and non-democracies and analyses of the implementation of legislative gender quotas. Our work highlights a previously unacknowledged government policy that penalizes women and also provides powerful evidence that descriptive representation can have a substantial, direct impact on discriminatory policies.

Empowering Women? Gender Quotas and Women’s Political Careers

Women’s representation in executive office continues to lag behind that of their female peers in legislatures, and several studies find women face an executive glass ceiling. One way to shatter this executive glass ceiling is through the adoption of legislative gender quotas. However, scholars know little about how legislative quotas affect women’s access to executive office. Previous research has been unable to determine whether once elected through quotas, women advance to executive office at similar rates to men. Using data on the future career paths of nearly 2,000 Mexican legislators, I find women face a glass ceiling in winning nomination to executive office. Using career data before and after quota implementation, and exploiting lax enforcement in the district component of the mixed electoral system, I find quotas have done little to increase the advancement of women into executive office, although they have increased opportunities for women in other legislative positions.

Do Parties and Voters Counteract Quota Regulations? The Impact of Legislative Gender Quotas on Ballot Ranking and Preference Voting in Poland

AbstractThis article investigates how the introduction of gender quotas affected female representation in an open-list proportional representation system. Based on the Polish parliamentary elections of 2005, 2007, 2011, and 2015, it attempts to explain the gap between the share of female candidates and the share of female legislators. The authors estimate changes in individual electoral chances using logistic regression. Subsequently, counterfactual reasoning is applied to display the results in the metrics of seat shares. The analyses of candidate-level data demonstrate that after the introduction of quotas, significantly more women ran for office, but parties and voters, on average, changed their preferences to the disadvantage of female candidates, even when incumbency and previous electoral experience were controlled. The article demonstrates that women benefited from the introduction of quotas, but not right away. The desired effect of gender quotas (an increase in female legislative representation) was mitigated mainly by the unequal distribution of “electoral capital” among candidates of both genders. The impact of this factor was moderated by ballot ranking patterns. Once women acquire more electoral capital, the role of party elites’ negative bias in ballot ranking becomes more visible.

How legislative gender quotas affect the gender gap in campaign spending: an analysis of the federal and regional elections in Belgium

ABSTRACTResearch on the link between gender and campaign finance in proportional electoral systems suggests that the campaign expenses of female parliamentary candidates are significantly lower than those of male candidates. On the basis of data on 10,436 candidates for nine consecutive elections in Belgium (1991–2014), this article examines whether there is indeed a gender gap in campaign expenses, and in particular whether this coincides with the introduction of legislative quota laws in the Belgian flexible-list system. We distinguish between realistic candidates that run for election from winnable list positions and unrealistic candidates running from lower ranked positions. The results show that, among unrealistic candidates, the gender gap in campaign spending arose again after the introduction of more severe gender quotas. With regard to realistic list positions, however, the significant difference between male and female candidates in the most strict quota phase disappeared, indicating that female realistic candidates were able to catch up financially with their male counterparts. The Belgian experience could provide useful insights for other countries with flexible-list systems regarding the implementation of legislative gender quotas.

Quotas and Gender Gaps in Political Participation among Established Industrial European Democracies: Distinguishing Within- and Across-Country Effects

This paper proposes to investigate the influence of legislative quotas on gender differences in political participation by analyzing the within- and across-country effects of quotas. Gender quotas can signal to women that their presence in politics is welcome, leading to a subsequent increase in their involvement in political activities. This change in political behavior should not be reproduced in men; thus, when gender quotas are present, the gap between men’s and women’s participation narrows. Using the European Values Survey and data from eighteen European democracies, this paper demonstrates that this indeed occurs for some political activities when gender gaps are compared before and after the introduction of quotas within countries. This result, however, is not replicated for across-country analyses. European countries without legislative gender quotas tend to have smaller gender gaps than countries with them. This result is explained by referring to the context of the adoption of gender quotas.

The Irish legislative gender quota: The first election

Abstract In 2012 legislative gender quotas were introduced as part of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government’s political reform agenda. The legislation specifies that payments to political parties ‘shall be reduced by 50 per cent, unless at least 30 per cent of the candidates whose candidatures were authenticated by the qualified party at the preceding general election were women and at least 30 per cent were men’. The 30 per cent gender threshold came into effect at the 2016 general election. Research demonstrates that gender quotas work to increase women’s political descriptive representation, but to do so, political parties must engage with them in ‘goodwill’, be ‘wellintentioned’ or place women in ‘winnable seats’. This article examines if this was the case at the 2016 general election. Using statistics, as well as drawing from interviews with party strategists, the article assesses the impact of gender quotas on women’s candidate selection and election. We conclude that parties did embrace the spirit of the gender quota law but resistance remains.

Making Space for Women: Explaining Citizen Support for Legislative Gender Quotas in Latin America

Gender quotas have been adopted in over a hundred countries in an effort to address gender disparities in national legislatures. Yet the determinants of citizen support for gender quota policies remain largely understudied. We develop a theory that emphasizes the impact of institutional performance and political values to explain citizen support for gender quotas and how these two factors differentially influence men’s and women’s quota support. Based on data for 24 Latin American countries, we find that citizens in countries with relatively good governance quality who express a strong preference for government involvement to improve citizens’ well-being show the highest levels of quota support. Further, whereas good governance increases quota support at a higher rate among men than women, preferences for government involvement exert a stronger influence on women’s support for quotas. Consequently, good governance quality reduces the gender gap in quota support by substantially increasing men’s support fo...

Refusing to know a woman’s place: the causes and consequences of rejecting stereotypes of women politicians in the Americas

ABSTRACTWhat are the sources and effects of gendered leadership stereotypes for women’s representation? We explore the role of stereotypes in shaping public attitudes toward women’s representation using AmericasBarometer survey data from 25 countries. We report three key results. First, the modal respondent in almost every country rejects gendered leadership stereotypes, affirming that women and men leaders are equally qualified on corruption and the economy. This holds even after we attempt to account for social desirability bias. Second, there are significant individual- and country-level determinants of stereotyping. In countries with higher women’s representation and labor force participation but without gender quotas, citizens are more likely to choose pro-female and neutral responses over pro-male stereotypes. At the individual level, those rejecting stereotypes are less authoritarian, more supportive of labor market equality, and more leftist than those reporting pro-female stereotypes. Third, the consequences for representation vary by partisanship and country context. Pro-female leadership stereotypes boost support for women presidential candidates and for legislative gender quotas, but they matter less among copartisans of women candidates, and they matter more when women candidates are viable but gendered outsiders. Those rejecting leadership stereotypes altogether are less supportive of quotas.

Interactions between Party and Legislative Quotas: Candidate Selection and Quota Compliance in Portugal and Spain

About two decades after the introduction of party quotas, in the mid-2000s both Portugal and Spain enacted legislative gender quotas. The simultaneous implementation of party and legislative quotas raises questions about the potential interactions between two types of candidate quotas sharing the same goal – granting gender equality in political representation. Following a feminist institutionalist approach, this article aims at disentangling under what circumstances compliance with legislative quotas is greater. By looking at the different party institutional contexts in which candidates are selected, a double comparative framework is set. Firstly, we examine within country how legislative quotas affect political parties with dissimilar strategies to pursue equal gender representation. Secondly, we analyse across countries how they impact on political parties with differently institutionalized voluntary quotas. The article shows that legislative quotas are nested in political parties’ candidate selection process and that existing gendered practices and norms limit the effective compliance with such measures.

Refusing to Know a Woman's Place: The Causes and Consequences of Rejecting Stereotypes of Women Politicians in Latin America

What are the sources and effects of gendered leadership stereotypes for women’s representation? We explore the role of stereotypes in shaping public attitudes towards women’s representation using AmericasBarometer survey data from 25 countries. We report three key results. First, the modal respondent in almost every country rejects gendered leadership stereotypes, affirming that women and men leaders are equally qualified on corruption and the economy. This holds even after we attempt to account for social desirability bias. Second, there are significant individual- and country-level determinants of stereotyping. In countries with higher women’s representation and labor force participation but without gender quotas, citizens are more likely to choose pro-female and neutral responses over pro-male stereotypes. At the individual level, those rejecting stereotypes are less authoritarian, more supportive of labor market equality, and more leftist than those reporting pro-female stereotypes. Third, the consequences for representation vary by partisanship and country context. Pro-female leadership stereotypes boost support for women presidential candidates and for legislative gender quotas, but they matter less among copartisans of women candidates, and they matter more when women candidates are viable but gendered outsiders. Those rejecting leadership stereotypes altogether are less supportive of quotas.

Women and the 2015 General Election: Shattering the Political Glass Ceiling?

While the 2015 General Election produced mixed electoral fortunes for the major parties, the results for women have been historic – 191 women were elected to the House of Commons on 7 May, including a record number of Scottish women MPs. This article reports on the 2015 GE from the perspective of women's representation, providing a gendered analysis of the election campaign and assessing the parties’ efforts to increase the number of women elected in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It argues that while the 2015 elections may have made some cracks in the political ‘glass ceiling’, further increases in women's representation are unlikely without greater commitment by all of the parties and without the use of strong equality measures, including legislative gender quotas.

Gender Quota Spill-Over in Sweden: From Politics to Business?

Ever since the 1990s, legislated gender quotas have been adopted across the world as a means to increase the number of women in elected bodies. In recent years, legislated gender quotas have also been adopted to rectify the under-representation of women on company boards. Sweden diverges from this trend. Despite the fact that Sweden has been recognized as a model of gender equality, being ranked among the most gender equal countries in the world and having achieved gender balanced political assemblies, legal gender quotas have not been enacted, neither in the political sphere nor in the economic sphere. This paper analyses women’s path to power in Sweden. It studies the adoption of special measures and provides an assessment of the factors that facilitate or hinder increases in the proportion of women decision-makers in the political and economic sectors. By applying feminist institutional theory, the dynamics of institutional configurations facilitating or hindering change is investigated. It is argued that the interplay of institutions in the political sector operated in a mutually reinforcing way, thereby constituting a good fit, while the interaction of institutions in the economic sector functioned in a conflicting way. It is also claimed that women’s movement organisations (working both within and outside of the political parties) represented critical actors in implementing party quotas in Sweden. Such coordinated efforts did not exist in the corporate sector. There, the forces of resistance were much stronger than the forces for change, thereby hindering the introduction of a legal corporate gender quota.

Women in local government: Moving in from the margins

Abstract This article presents a descriptive overview of women’s participation in the elected and administrative structures of local government in the Republic of Ireland. Drawing on analysis of candidate data and electoral results from the 2014 local elections, it shows that women’s political representation currently stands at just under 21 per cent, a record high for women’s participation in the elected structures of county and city councils. The article evaluates the lessons learned about political parties, gender and candidate recruitment at the 2014 local elections. It argues that the impending introduction of legislative gender quotas at the next general election was the main driving force behind women’s increased participation in these elections. Turning attention to the administrative structures of local authorities, it is revealed that men continue to dominate senior management positions. While increasing numbers of women are accessing senior management roles, gendered barriers remain. The article concludes by reflecting on the future prospects for women’s participation in both the elected and administrative structures of local government in the Republic of Ireland. It recommends an extension of legal gender quotas to local elections and a more proactive gender promotional and mentoring campaign within local government administrative structures.

WILL LEGISLATIVE GENDER QUOTAS INCREASE FEMALE REPRESENTATION IN IRELAND? A FEMINIST INSTITUTIONALISM ANALYSIS

Informed by insights from feminist institutionalism, this article considers the effect of various aspects of the Irish political system on women's candidate selection and election, and discusses the extent to which the new gender quota law will be facilitated by these processes. In studying Ireland the article highlights a relatively under-studied case in the comparative literature on gender and politics. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of feminist institutionalism research by examining the mechanisms surrounding female candidate recruitment, selection and election to assess the likely impact of gender quotas on women's political representation in Ireland. Taking Ireland's relatively unique PR-STV electoral system as the primary institutional context, we argue that the electoral system interacts with cultural factors to determine female candidacy opportunities and suggest that the biggest challenge to the effective implementation of legislative gender quotas in Ireland are informal mechanisms such as masculinised party cultures, societal gendered legacies and pre-existing informal rules surrounding incumbency and localism. However, we advise if party leaders and selectorates are willing to fully embrace gender quotas and integrate them into their candidate nomination processes, there is evidence to suggest that this will have a positive effect on increasing women's political representation in Ireland.