Do Gender Quotas Influence Women’s Representation and Policies?

This paper investigates the effect of applying gender quotas on policy decisions. I first examine the effect of gender quotas on the representation of female legislators, study the correlation between gender quotas and different types of government expenditures, and then use quotas as an instrument for the proportion of female legislators to investigate the effect of female legislators on policy outcomes. The results show that an increase in the share of female legislators by one percentage point increases the ratio of government expenditure on health and social welfare to GDP by 0.18 and 0.67 percentage points, respectively. The robustness check supports that the effect of quotas on female legislators is likely to be translated into the influence of female policymakers on social welfare.