Thank you to our ~500 readers who keep us motivated to keep this substack going. As always, if you have an article you’d like us to feature in the next newsletter, please reach out at bhumi.purohit@gmail.com.
Opportunities
The APSA Women’s Research Mentoring Workshop will be held virtually in Spring 2023. The workshop is sponsored and organized by the American Political Science Association and funded by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association. The workshop will be an opportunity for women in all subfields of political science to network with peer scholars and female mentors in their field and receive focused expert feedback on their research.
Apply Now! Applications are due February 12, 2023.
The Max Planck Summer School for Women in Political Economy will be held in Cologne, Germany. 20 funded places are available – five of which are reserved for participants from the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE).
Apply Now! Applications are due March 15, 2023.
Politics & Gender’s First View (2023) features the following Critical Perspectives essays on crises:
Diana Z. O’Brien and Jennifer M. Piscopo’s “Gender and Political Representation in Times of Crisis” summarize the series, which they say focuses on how “(1) the type of crisis, (2) the actors influenced by the crisis, and (3) the aftermath of the crisis” influence gender representation.
Rachel Brulé’s “Climate Shocks and Gendered Political Transformation: How Crises Alter Women’s Political Representation” examines how climate shocks, or discrete and unanticipated weather events, can compel women to become politically and economically involved in their communities.
Louise K. Davidson-Schmich, Farida Jalalzai and Malliga Och’s “Crisis, Gender Role Congruency, and Perceptions of Executive Leadership” asks if crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic create opportunities for women leaders to be seen as competent leaders. The authors argue that where crises create conditions where traditional gender norms and the leadership expectations coincide, women will be seen as apt leaders.
Corinna Kroeber and Sarah C. Dingler’s “Crisis and Gender in Legislative-Executive Relations” argue that when legislative and executive crises require female-stereotypic solutions (e.g. “transform together – build trust”), they can transform how masculine leadership is viewed in favor of female leadership. On the other hand, crises that require male-stereotypic solutions (e.g. “act fast - give slack”) can reaffirm the status quo of masculine leadership styles.
Catherine Reyes-Housholder, Julieta Suárez-Cao and Carmen Le Foulon’s “Unpacking the Gendered Consequences of Protest-Driven Crises” examine massive uprisings that coincide with violence and system-level critiques. Violence in these uprisings can force top-level leadership to hone in on top-down, masculine style leadership. However, shared grievances of protesters can create countering effects. Lastly, system-level critiques stemming from these protests can, in some conditions, lead to calls for more inclusive institutions that promote women’s representation.
Aili Mari Tripp’s “War, Revolution, and the Expansion of Women’s Political Representation” examines how conflict—from WWI and WWII to revolutions—can usurp the political elite and ruling classes, leading to changes in political institutions. These moments allow women’s rights activists to advance their agendas.
M. Mehrab Bakhtiar, Marcel Fafchamps, Markus Goldstein, Kenneth L. Leonard & Sreelakshmi Papineni, “Women's Empowerment and the Intrinsic Demand for Agency: Experimental Evidence from Nigeria,” NBER Working Paper 30789.
This working paper provides important insights into whether married, heterosexual couples consult each other, honestly communicate with each other, defer to each other, or accommodate each other's preferences while selecting household allocation of rival and non-rival goods. In both lab-in-the-field and field experiments in northern Nigeria, the authors do not see significant differences in couples’ allocation preferences. They find that (pg. 4):
Women are far more likely than men to consult their husbands, defer their decision to their husbands and accommodate their husband’s wishes. Men tend to make a decision and neither seek nor accommodate their wife’s wishes… We find
weak evidence that women misrepresent their true preferences, but not by very much. Men, in contrast, report their true preferences to their wives.
Additionally, the authors examine an experiment involving unconditional cash transfers to women over 15 months; some women were allowed to keep their allocation decisions a secret from their husbands. Overall, treated women were less like to defer their choices over how to use the money to husbands, but only when such a decision was kept secret. Unfortunately, unconditional cash transfers to women only marginally improved their agency rather than lead them to challenge their husbands’ preferences.
Timm Betz, David Fortunato, and Diana O’Brien. (2023) “Do Women Make More Protectionist Trade Policy?” APSR.
Betz, Fortunato, and O’Brien show that - yes, women make more protectionist trade policy - in their letter article that came out in the APSR in January.
This trio of scholars builds on the established finding that, on average, women in many countries and contexts are more protectionists than men.
What about women candidates and legislators? Betz et al. show that female legislators are also more protectionists than their male counterparts in the European Parliament, among candidates running in national parliamentary elections in 11 countries, and in the US House.
Do increases in women’s representation lead to more protectionist statements in party platforms?
Yes, they find a significant, positive association between women’s representation and level of protectionism in the party platform
Data: From party platforms in 81 national elections across 20 democracies from 1996 to 2017
Do increases in women’s representation lead to more protectionist trade policy?
“The findings suggest that a higher share of women legislators and cabinet members translates into more protectionist trade policy on higher-visibility consumption products.”
Data: The analysis combines data on women’s political representation with tariffs at the level of Broad Economic Categories (BEC) for 141 countries from 1991 to 2019.
“We show that women’s representation leaves an imprint even on issues that are not overtly gendered. At the same time, there are limits to these effects: the influence of descriptive representation is confined to products where observability is high and opposition from business interests is muted.”
Payson, J., Fouirnaies, A., & Hall, A. (2023). “Decomposing the source of the gender gap in legislative committee service: Evidence from US states.” Political Science Research and Methods, 11(1), 191-197.
In the US, women legislators are more likely to serve on committees and sponsor bills associated with “women’s issues,” such as health and education. Payson et al. want to know: how much of this gender gap in committee membership and bill sponsorship can be explained by the type of districts women are elected from, the backgrounds that they have, or because the committee assignment process steers women legislators to these “women’s issue” committees (perhaps via stereotypes or biases from those in the control of the committee assignment process)?
Using data from US state legislators from 1986 to 2014, Payson et al. show that two channels - the type of districts women are elected from and the backgrounds women legislators tend to have - explains over half of the gender gap in bill sponsorship.
However, when controlling for district fixed-effects and policy expertise (measured with fundraising data), the gender gap in committee assignments stays fairly constant. This is a very interesting result, because it implies that the committee assignment process (for whatever reason, the authors cannot determine in this paper) steers women to “women’s issue” committees more than we would expect based on the attitudes of their district and the background of the women legislators.
“These results suggest that institutional processes are playing a substantial role in channeling women onto certain types of committees. For example, women may be assigned to women’s issue committees because of explicit stereotypes, or because of implicit biases, or because of self-censoring, or for any combination of these reasons and others.”
That is all for this month - but we will be back with more next time! There has been a ton of Gender & Politics research coming out recently - we look forward to reading and discussing all this new work with you all.