Anekantavad

When I wrote my short missive on motivated citations nine years ago, I didn't ship with examples because I wanted to leave those to a paper. I never wrote the paper. But each time I review a "literature," I rue the missed opportunity to highlight this important issue. This time, I am turning that regret into a post.

Women Representatives as Brahmastra

Brown et al. (2025) summarize the literature on reserving political positions for women as follows:

"A large literature has found positive effects of female political representation on education (Beaman et al., 2012; Clots-Figueras, 2011, 2012), health (Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras, 2014; Clayton and Zetterberg, 2018), infrastructure (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004), economic growth (Baskaran et al., 2024), corruption (Jha and Sarangi, 2018), female entrepreneurship and employment opportunities (Ghani et al., 2014; Deininger et al., 2020), crime reporting and crimes against women (Iyer et al., 2012; Bochenkova et al., 2023) and the environment (Mavisakalyan and Tarverdi, 2019; Jagnani and Madadevan, 2024). ...

A large body of literature has found a positive impact of having a female leader on various outcomes. For example, female leaders have been shown to invest more in health and education (Pathak and Macours, 2017), raise aspiration (Beaman et al., 2012), invest more in water and roads (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004), and improve immunization (Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras, 2014) and other local public goods (Duflo, 2005). Female leaders in village Panchayats also improve the quality and effectiveness of rural development programs, including the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) (Beaman et al.,2012; Deininger et al., 2015), and are better at providing local jobs under the NREGS as an insurance against negative shocks (Bose and Das, 2018; Deininger et al., 2020)."

Hessami and Fonseca (2020) doing a literature review concur:

"Villages assigned a female leader are found to provide more public goods (Beaman, Duflo, Pande, and Topalova, 2007) that better reflect women’s preferences (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004), and whose quality is at least as high as in unreserved villages (Beaman, Duflo, Pande, and Topalova, 2007). As a consequence, children do better along health dimensions, girls spend less time on household chores, and the gender gap in school attendance and educational attainment decreases more strongly in villages with a female leader than in those with a male leader (Beaman, Duflo, Pande, and Topalova, 2007, 2012)."

Are the Effects Uniformly Positive?

Pathak and MacCours (2016) (cited by Brown et al. 2025) are more skeptical:

"More generally, not all the available evidence points to positive impacts. Ban and Rao (2008) show that women’s reservation in four Southern States, including Andhra Pradesh, does not lead to more investments congruent with women’s preferences. Bardhan, Mookherjee and Para Torrado (2010) further show that female reservation can lead to worse targeting of private benefits within villages, and as such potentially limit the impact of the public good investments. Yet Besley, Pande and Rao (2005) find no such impact on targeting. Sathe et al. (2013) find better service delivery in villages with female leaders who have been in power for 3.5 years, but worse in those where female leaders only recently came to power. And related, Afridi, Iversen and Sharan (2013) find more leakage in NREGA programs with female leadership, but improvement in governance as female leaders gain more experience. Deininger et al. (2015) also found that quality of service provision might be worse on the short run, but better on the long run.

...

Indeed, both Chattopadhayay and Duflo (2004) and Ban and Rao (2008) show that female and male preferences can be quite heterogeneous between GPs, so that one would not necessarily expect reservation to lead to similar investments in all GPs..."

Afridi et al. (2013) concur

"Others have questioned such differences in male and female leadership behavior (Rajaraman and Gupta, 2012) and its consequences for governance and corruption in development settings. Ban and Rao’s (2008) study of four South Indian states found that “(village councils) led by women are no worse or better in their performance than those with male leaders, and women politicians do not make decisions in line with the needs of women.” Bardhan et al. (2010) find female reservations of village council headships in West Bengal to be associated with a significant worsening of within-village targeting to socio-economically disadvantaged households, and no improvement on any other targeting dimension."

Miscitation

"Using data from two states and comparing villages with and without reserved headship for women, Duflo and Chattopadhyay (2004) and Beaman et al. (2007) find that the composition of public infrastructure at the village level is a function of the gender of the leader, with women being more likely to invest in drinking water and roads.

Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras (2012)

"In West Bengal, women complain more often than men about drinking water and roads, and there are more investments in drinking water and roads in GPs reserved for women. In Rajasthan, women complain more often than men about drinking water but less often about roads ..."

Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004)

"In West Bengal, but not Rajasthan, roads were better under women presidents."

Nilekani (2010)