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Leading by example: The Role Model Effect

Mon 13 February 2012

, LEAP redaktie, LEAP

A new study co-authored by MIT economist Esther Duflo, shows that the increased presence of local female political leaders in India has had a marked impact on adolescents and their families, raising the career aspirations and educational performance of young women. “We think this is due to a role-model effect: Seeing women in charge persuaded parents and teens that women can run things, and increased their ambitions,” says Duflo. She adds: “Changing perceptions and giving hope can have an impact on reality.”

Based on a survey of roughly 8,000 Indian adolescents and parents, the research paper, that appeared in Science last month, notes that having women serve as the leader, or pradhan, of a village council erases the prevailing “gender gap” that tends to work in favor of young men, provided that female politicians remain visible in local government for an extended period of time.

Erasing the gender gap
The study focuses on West Bengal, a state in eastern India, where one-third of the pradhan positions have been randomly reserved for women since 1998. This policy is part of a larger effort in India to put women in local government: In 1993, the country widely adopted gender quotas for village councils. As a result, India’s proportion of local elected leaders who were female rose from less than 5 percent in 1992 to more than 40 percent in 2000.

The researchers surveyed families in 495 villages with children ages 11 to 15, collecting the data in 2007. In villages that had never had female leaders, they found, both parents and adolescents maintained a large gender gap in terms of their expectations for children: For instance, parents were 45 percent less likely to state that they wanted their girls to graduate from school or study beyond the secondary-school level, in comparison to the parents’ aspirations for boys. Adolescents themselves who had never been around female pradhan had a slightly smaller gender gap, of 32 percent.

However, among adolescents whose villages had had female pradhan serving two terms, the gender gap concerning educational goals was completely erased. That change stemmed entirely from raised aspirations on the part of the girls; the boys’ level of expected schooling remained constant. Among parents in these villages, the gender gap in aspiration closed by 25 percent.

Significantly, in villages with female leaders, the gender gap vanishes not only in terms of expectations, but also concrete results. In places with no female pradhan, boys are 6 percent more likely to attend school and 4 percent more likely to be literate. But in places that have had a female pradhan for two terms in office, that gap disappears.

Moreover, having female pradhan creates some other changes in the daily lives of girls. In villages that have never had female leaders, girls typically spend 79 more minutes per day than boys do in dealing with domestic chores. In villages where women have been the pradhan for two terms, that disparity shrinks by 18 minutes.

Read more: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/female-politicians-0113.html