Investigators: Soledad Prillaman, Nivedita Narain, Alba Huidobro, and Deepak Singhania

Partner Organizations: Transform Rural India (TRI); Inclusion Economics India Centre (IEIC); Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Funders: Stanford Impact Labs

Location: Madhya Pradesh, India

Status: Data collection & analysis

Abstract

Despite widespread policies aimed at gender equality, women remain poorly represented in politics and policy. Global attention on women’s political inclusion has coalesced around solutions that enable women’s descriptive representation — the guarantee of women’s presence in political spaces. But presence does not guarantee voice. Women’s voices — their demands, needs, and interests — remain poorly represented in politics and policy. This imperfect representation of women’s voices in political institutions contributes to persistent and intractable inequalities in policy access and social outcomes. Nowhere is this more salient than in India, where women continue to face chronic underrepresentation in politics despite being home to the largest gender quota policy in the world. Presently, there are two institutions geared toward promoting gender equality that operate at a tremendous scale throughout India but are rarely conceptualized as working in tandem: electoral quotas and women’s groups known as Self-Help Groups SHGs are micro-credit collectives of women that meet regularly in women-only spaces and have been shown to substantially increase women’s political participation. Where electoral quotas are a top-down institution that ensures women’s presence in positions of political power, SHGs are a bottom-up institution that creates the conditions for women’s demands to be mobilized. In partnership with TRIF, the ID2 Lab will evaluate the efficacy of three existing interventions that link these top-down and bottom-up institutions as a means of catalyzing systemic change. These three interventions are: providing capacity-building and support to women elected representatives, organizing women-only citizen-representative political forums, and developing the networks of women elected representatives and bureaucrats. The research team will evaluate both the collective and individual impact of each intervention on gender equality outcomes through conducting a randomized control trial with five treatment arms. The intervention pilots are expected to begin in the spring of 2024.