Quotas Didn't Reduce Average Gender Bias — They Helped Young Women

📌 Why This Study?

A high-profile policy experiment in India showed that reserving village leadership seats for women reduced gender stereotypes and boosted aspirations and schooling for girls. This raises two questions: do those effects generalize beyond India, and how long must quotas be in place before changes appear? This study evaluates whether six years of exposure to quota-elected women village representatives in Lesotho led to reduced citizen gender bias.

🔎 How Attitudes Were Measured

• Surveys capturing explicit gender attitudes and beliefs
• In-field Implicit Association Tests (IATs) capturing unconscious gender associations
• Comparison focuses on communities with six years of quota-elected women leaders versus appropriate controls

🧾 Key Findings

• No evidence that the quota reduced average measures of citizen gender bias (explicit or implicit) after six years of exposure.
• Weak evidence that young women, in particular, exhibited more gender-egalitarian attitudes following quota exposure, with indicators present on both explicit survey items and the IAT.

🔔 Why It Matters

These results suggest limited generalizability of the positive India findings to Lesotho over a six-year horizon. While quotas appear to produce some targeted changes among young women, they did not shift average citizen attitudes in this setting. The findings highlight the importance of context and the possibility that longer exposure or different local conditions are necessary for quotas to alter population-level gender bias.