Do female parliamentarians improve environmental quality? Cross-country evidence

This study explores the empowerment of women in politics on the environmental sustainability. Using data for the period 2015-2019 from 179 countries, we investigate the link between representation of women in parliament and the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). To explore the causal effect, we rely on gender quotas, language intensity and land suitability for agriculture as instruments for the share of women in parliament. Our results suggest that 10 percentage points increase in instrumented proportion of women in parliament leads to 7.1 points increase in the EPI. The results remain robust to a number of robustness checks.