Female Empowerment in Northern India: Effects of the Political Reservation System on Gender Bias

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The government of India has attempted to address the low status of women in society though a constitutional amendment that mandates a woman must be elected as village leader every third election cycle. Several papers have shown that female reservations have significant effects on local policy decisions, but it is unknown whether the amendment is effective in its primary goal to erode discrimination against women. In my thesis I use uniquelytailored household and village data to investigate whether political gender reservations can decrease sex bias by evaluating changes in female investments of those living in villages with female village leaders. Using OLS regressions, I find that only when a female village leader has financial resources are there changes in sex ratios, immunization rates, and school enrollment that are consistent with greater female bargaining power. However, I also find that maternal bargaining power is correlated to low sex ratios. These results show that political reservations for females must be supplemented with sound financial resources in order to increase women’s status and bargaining power, but doing so without changing maternal sonpreference will not be effective in fixing the skewed sex ratio.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2008

Author	Suen, Sze-chuan
Primary advisor	Kochar, Anjini
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Economics

Subject	Stanford Department of Economics
Subject	India
Subject	female sarpanch
Subject	son preference
Subject	female empowerment
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/ch115fr8299

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Preferred Citation: Suen, Sze-chuan. (2008). Female Empowerment in Northern India: Effects of the Political Reservation System on Gender Bias. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/ch115fr8299

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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