Political reservations and women’s economic activity in India

Abstract

Gender equality is important for economic development. In this paper, I will investigate the relationship between women's political reservation in local governance in India and women's economic activity within the labour market. I will also examine how a change in the proportion of reserved women from 33% to 50% impact women’s economic activity. I take advantage of the randomization that is implemented in the reform and use a Difference-in-Difference method to evaluate these questions. The results are mixed, when estimating the impact of a female chairperson, I find no significant results. Upon studying the number of times, a district had a female chairperson I find a fairly robust and significant positive effect from the reform on women's economic activity. However, I find no evidence that an increase in the quota from 33% to 50% on political reservation impacted women's labour force participation