Increases In Women’s Political Representation Associated With Reductions In Child Mortality In Brazil

Abstract

We assessed the effects of female political representation on mortality among children younger than age five in Brazil and the extent to which this effect operates through coverage with conditional cash transfers and primary care services. We combined data on under-five mortality rates with data on women elected as mayors or representatives in state and federal legislatures for 3,167 municipalities during 2000–15. Results from fixed-effects regression models suggest that the election of a female mayor and increases in the shares of women elected to state legislatures and to the federal Chamber of Deputies to 20 percent or more were significantly associated with declines in under-five mortality. Increasing the political representation of women was likely associated with beneficial effects on child mortality through pathways that expanded access to primary health care and conditional cash transfer programs.

Women’s empowerment and infant mortality in Latin America: evidence from 286 cities

“…This adds to the evidence that fostering women's development and improving women's status may bring benefits beyond women's own interests (Varkey andLesnick 2010, Clots-Figueras 2012). These findings support the importance of actively engaging women in urban politics and governance to assure sustainability of this progress (ECLAC 2016, Hessel et al 2020.…”

“…Although we included two important measures of women's empowerment, we were not able to characterize other aspects of WE such as political participation of women in local and national governments which have been shown to be related to infant mortality in the region (Hessel et al 2020). Due to data limitation we were not able to characterize the proportion of women living in poverty or the level of women's income in cities.…”

Inclusive Cities: Healthy Cities for All

“…There are also interventions that go further upstream. For example, in an analysis of data from Brazilian municipalities, having more women in politics was associated with declines in under-five mortality, partially through improvements in primary health care and income redistribution programs (Hessel et al, 2020).…”

“…Many city and neighborhood-level factors are linked to a wide variety of health outcomes in the Latin American context. These include social characteristics like educational attainment, socioeconomic status, and women's political representation, as well as physical characteristics related to housing quality, access to basic services, including clean water and sewage connections, transit options and traffic delays, among others, Bilal, Hessel, et al, 2021;Braverman-Bronstein et al, 2021;Carvajal et al, 2020;Hessel et al, 2020;Mazariegos et al, 2021;. Urban environmental features that cut across these many policy domains present opportunities for policymaking to improve health and reduce health disparities in cities.…”

Just Aquatic Governance: The Amazon basin as fertile ground for aligning participatory conservation with social justice

“…However, there is still much to be done in the context of transformative freshwater governance, as management of arapaima is the only source of fishing income for most of the women in the community, despite their participation in other fishing activities (Freitas, Espírito‐Santo, et al, 2020). There is clear potential for social justice here, as more equity in the distribution of income within the family translates to higher levels of nutrition for all, and higher survival rates of children (Doss, 2006; Hessel, Jaramillo, Rasella, Duran, & Sarmiento, 2020). A transformative governance regime will have to work specifically towards empowering women as this, despite being a human rights issue, may be one of the hardest transformative cultural shifts (Fine & Sojo, 2019).…”