Gender Quotas Are Good for Politics (and Politicians)

Gender quotas are a contested issue, both as a way to promote the role of women in the economy and in politics. Advocates argue that they are needed to reverse gender discrimination in the labor market, in career advancement and political position.

Detractors say they are anti-meritocratic, so that inferior candidates are selected. In other words, these people are saying that if women are put at the top because of a legal constraint, qualified and capable women will be hard to find, so that average quality of either business or political personnel could well decrease.
This line of reasoning widespread in Italy and it has surfaced in the debate around Law 120 of 2011 which imposes minimal women's representation in the boards of listed companies. In a country where women are on average more educated than men, this kind of argument seems unpersuasive from the start. Empirically, it can be proved it is wrong.
In our paper Gender quotas and the quality of politicians co-written with Audinga Baltrunaite and Piera Bello we estimate the impact of the introduction of gender quotas on the quality of Italian politicians in local politics. We use as experiment the Law 81 of 1993, which says that no gender can exceed 2/3 of candidates in a given political list. The constitutional court unexpectedly rule it unconstitutional in 1995, and the law was abolished. The fact is that in 1993-1995 several cities voted for their municipal elections with the law was still valid, while another group of cities didn't, because elections weren't scheduled in that two-year period.
This allowed us to identify two groups: the tested group of gender-progressive municipalities and the control group identifying the other municipalities. We could then employ difference-in-difference methodology to estimate differences in the average quality of elected politicians in the two groups of municipalities. Following an established practice in political science, we measure the quality of political personnel with years of education. The results of the econometric analysis show that the presence of gender quotas is correlated with an increase of the average quality (education) of elected local politicians. This not only because on average women are better educated than men, but also because the number of male candidates with low education decreased. In other words, the presence of women led to an increase in the number of women elected, who substituted less-educated men.
Although focusing on local politics, the conclusions that can be drawn from our paper are far-reaching. Gender quotas do not decrease the quality of elected representatives. Actually, the opposite is true. Italy, a country dominated by a powerful male gerontocracy, stands to benefit from the societal renewal that the introduction of gender quotas would bring.