Women, they get the job done
As a son of immigrants and someone who has been living outside his home country far longer than in it, there is one famous line from the musical Hamilton that always resonated with me. In the song Yorktown, Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette congratulate each other with the slogan: Immigrants, we get the job done.
True or not, there is at least mounting evidence that a related line is true: Women, they get the job done.
I have written about the positive impact women have on corporate boards (e.g. here or here) and now there is some evidence that female politicians are also good for economic growth. A new study looked at the economic growth of electoral constituencies in India that are led by male or female politicians. Of course, India doesn’t publish GDP growth by electoral constituency, so the researcher used the method of measuring light emissions as captured by satellites to estimate GDP growth. This methodology is widely used these days to estimate the true growth of GDP in countries like China and North Korea because economic development is closely related to light emissions from factories, traffic and households. To double-check the results of these measurements, the study also looked at the simple mileage of new roads built in different areas of India, something that local politicians can control easily.
Normally, one wouldn’t associate female politicians with eagerness to build more roads, so the amount of roads built in a constituency may underestimate the growth impact of female politicians. But if it does, that would be even worse news for male politicians in India, because whether you look at light emissions or roads built, constituencies led by female politicians in India showed about 1.8 percentage points higher growth than constituencies led by male politicians. Given an average GDP growth rate in India of 7%, that means that under female politicians, growth was about a quarter higher than under male politicians.
Notably, growth accelerated after female politicians were elected and decelerated after they lost power. And if one constituency elected a female leader, neighbouring constituencies with male leaders did not experience any growth spillovers. Growth in neighbouring male-led constituencies kept on lagging female-led constituencies. Meanwhile, one metric was indeed worse for female-led constituencies: the growth in personal wealth of the female political leaders significantly lagged that of male political leaders while they were in office. Given that India is ranked 86th in the latest Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, the authors have a simple explanation for this result and I think you can work that out for yourself.