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Abstract
Despite income growth, fertility decline, and educational expansion, female labour force participation in rural India dropped precipitously over the last decade. Nation-wide individual-level data allow us to explore if random reservation of village leadership for females affected women’s access to job opportunities, their demand for participation in the labour force, and income as well as intra-household bargaining in the short-and medium term. Gender reservation of local leadership affected female but not male participation in public works and regular labour markets, their income, and their influence on key household decisions with a lag, suggesting that such reservation affected social norms and stereotypes.
Acknowledgement
The views presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank Group, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. We would like to thank the IRMA team led by J. P Singh, Anupam Chatterjee, Vipul Jain, and the Survey team led by T.K. Krishan for excellent support in data collection.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
Data and code will be made available to researchers upon request.
Notes
1 India ranks 149 of 153 in the Economic Participation and Opportunity sub-index of the 2020 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, before only Pakistan, Yemen, and Iraq. Although levels of gender inequality across Indian regions vary with agricultural endowments that affected demand for and value of female labour (Carranza Citation2014), such intra-country variation cannot explain low overall levels of female participation.
2 Changes in returns to home vs. market production may have adversely affected educated women’s labour force participation (Afridi et al. Citation2018). Yet, higher wealth and income by other household members also reduce women’s probability of entry to the labour force and increases the likelihood of their exit (Sarkar et al., Citation2019). Increased real wages may have resulted in a negative income effect, potentially outweighing increases in labour supply (Mehrotra & Parida Citation2017).
3 Access to roads or transport is also associated with increased access to nonagricultural employment that affects women more than men, especially in communities with more egalitarian gender norms (Lei, Desai, & Vanneman, Citation2019).
4 The functions of the village leader (sarpanch) are defined in states’ Panchayat Raj Acts. For example the Telangana Act states that “The sarpanch shall (a) exercise all the powers and perform all the functions specifically conferred or imposed on the Sarpanch by this Act or the rules made thereunder; (b) exercise administrative control over the Panchayat Secretary and supervise his work for the purpose of implementation of the resolutions of the Gram Panchayat or any committee thereof; (c) incur contingent expenditure up to such limit as may be fixed by the Government from time to time and authorize payment and refunds with the approval of Gram Panchayat; (d) act only within the terms of sanction given in any resolution of the Gram Panchayat; (e) maintain sanitation in the village; (f) take up plantation and maintain Green coverage in the village; (g) for the purpose of effective functioning of the Gram Panchayat, the Sarpanch shall reside in the village and visit the Gram Panchayat office regularly.” See https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/8492/1/Act%205%20of%202018.pdf
5 Beyond gender, pradhan (village council’s headship) seats can also be reserved for scheduled castes and tribes. As seats are not allocated randomly and evidence suggests that politicians’ incentives to allocate benefits along party lines may blunt such quotas’ effects (Dunning & Nilekani, Citation2013), we focus on female reservation only. For discussion of caste reservation see (Kaletski & Prakash, Citation2016) and (Chin & Prakash, Citation2011).
6 In Spain, quotas resulted in slightly better electoral results for parties most affected, suggesting that without the quota, party leaders were not maximizing electoral results due to agency problems hindering female representation in political institutions (Casas-Arce & Saiz, Citation2015).
7 Similar outcomes are observed in West Bengal (Beaman et al., Citation2009), South India (Besley, Pande, Rahman, & Rao, Citation2004) and urban Mumbai (Bhavnani, Citation2009). Length of exposure to women politicians is also linked to more formal sector entrepreneurship (Ghani et al., Citation2014).
8 Applicants are eligible to receive a job card containing photos of all adult household members free within 15 days of application. The indicative work demands by job-card holders lead to elaboration of an annual plan that, once ratified by the village assembly, is transmitted for consolidation at the district level, although in practice a more top-down process is often followed, based on central budget allocations.
9 The original survey, in 1971, was based on a representative sample of about 4,500 households in 252 villages in 16 states in 1971. Subsequent rounds took place in 1982, 1999, and 2006. While resource limitations precluded expansion of this exercise to all states, villages in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa and West Bengal were revisited in 2014/15 by IRMA with funding support from Brown University, German Development Institute, and the World Bank. Figure 1 displays the location of sample villages in REDS.
10 Data can be accessed at https://www.devdatalab.org/shrug. Village names could be matched manually for all except 14 villages and the IDs obtained in this way were matched to data from the Economic Census accessible at http://microdata.gov.in/nada43/index.php/catalog/ECO.
11 In 2009/10 all states in our sample except Bihar and Madhya Pradesh (where the share was 50 percent) required a third of villages to reserve the pradhan position for a woman. By 2015 all except Haryana and Uttar Pradesh had increased the share of panchayats required to reserve seats for women to 50 percent. Whatever the overall share, because a village’s reservation status is exogenously given it does not affect our analysis. For a detailed discussion of how randomization is implemented see Dunning and Nilekani (2013) and Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004).
12 To illustrate: R1v for villages in Andhra Pradesh equals one if, in this village, the 2011 election was reserved for a woman and R2v equals one if in this village the 2006 election had been reserved. Similarly, for villages in Orissa R1v and R2v equal 1 if the 2012 or 2007 elections were reserved.
13 Control variables are included to increase efficiency but do not affect the significance of parameter estimates for the variables of interest.
14 As NREGS is required to offer conditions favorable for females by law, it is not surprising to find estimated coefficients for work performed under this program to be consistently larger than for non NREGS-related work.
15 Regressions distinguishing non-NREGS related work for married and unmarried individuals along the extensive and intensive margin (table A4) are included in the appendix.
16 As shows, reservation-induced impacts on NREGS governance preceded effects on program participation and income that, based on our results, materialized with a lag only. Resources from increased labor market participation in the second period thus appear to reinforce the role model effect rather than the reverse.