Leading toward equality: the effect of women mayors on gender equality in local bureaucracies

ABSTRACT

Do women elected officials contribute to the creation of public sector workforces that are more representative of the populations they serve? A more representative bureaucracy is expected to produce better outcomes, and thus understanding the role that elected leadership plays in diversifying the bureaucracy is important. Using data from over 5000 Brazilian municipalities from 2001 to 2012, we examine whether the election of women mayors leads to the formation of municipal executive bureaucracies that are more representative in terms of gender. In addition, we test whether the presence of a woman mayor leads to increased wages for women bureaucrats and smaller wage gaps between men and women bureaucrats. We find that while women mayors do not increase women’s numerical representation in the municipal executive bureaucracy, they do contribute to the creation of bureaucracies with fewer gender inequalities. Electing a woman mayor increases the average wages of women bureaucrats and decreases the gender wage gap in the bureaucracy. These findings suggest that women mayors advocate for the promotion of women to leadership positions and reduce the gap between men’s and women’s ranks in the bureaucracy since the salaries of Brazilian civil servants are linked to their positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Local governments
• gender inequality
• Brazil
• women
• public administration
• mayors
• representation
• representative bureaucracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Representative Bureaucracy “mini-conference” at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in 2016. We thank the conference attendees and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier drafts.

2 While racial and ethnic minorities are also underrepresented in Brazil, we do not examine race/ethnicity due to a lack of data. See Kay, Mitchell-Walthour, and White (2015) for a discussion of race in Brazil.

3 During 2001–2012, R$139 Brazilian reais (BRL) was equivalent to between $44.55 and $82.74 US dollars (USD). The exchange rate ranged between 3.12 BRL to 1 USD in 2003 and 1.68 BRL to 1 USD in 2011.

4 The maximum value is due to a small municipality, Israelandia. While this value is an outlier and may be due to misreported data, we opt to keep it in the models. Results are robust to dropping this observation.