Women’s Political Representation and Female Enterprise: Evidence from India

• In Event: Gender Quotas and Women's Agency

Abstract

A significant body scholarship demonstrates that quotas for women can serve as a powerful impetus for the political representation of women (eg. Chattopadhay and Duflo 2004, Bhavnani 2009; Iyer et al. 2012). Yet, the evidence regarding the influence of this formal and descriptive representation on socio-economic inequalities is more mixed, with recent research showing that quotas can even lead to backlash when the economic interests of men are credibly threatened by reform (Brule 2020). Drawing on uniquely comprehensive data, we study how female representation through mandated quotas shapes the prospects of woman entrepreneurs India. Political influence plays a key role in determining the success and failure of enterprise in the developing world, and we link the incidence of rotating reservations for women in villages and cities in India to an economic census encompassing millions of firms to examine if quotas can close vast gender gaps in the number, size, formalization, and access to credit of businesses in India. Our paper constitutes one of the first efforts of its kind to link a widely studied natural experiment on female representation to the novel domain of enterprise formation and growth.

Authors

• Naveen Bharathi

• Gautam Nair, Harvard University

• Anwesha Bhattacharya, Harvard University