Maternal Mortality and Women’s Political Power

Abstract

Millions of women continue to die during and soon after childbirth, even where the knowledge and resources to avoid this are available. We posit that raising the share of women in parliament can trigger action. Leveraging the timing of gender quota legislation across developing countries, we identify sharp sustained reductions of 8-10 percent in maternal mortality. Investigating mechanisms, we find that gender quotas lead to increases in percentage points of 5-8 in skilled birth attendance and 4-8 in prenatal care utilization, alongside a decline in fertility of 6-7 percent and an increase in the schooling of young women of about 0.5 years. The results are robust to numerous robustness checks. They suggest a new policy tool for tackling maternal mortality.

Women's Political Representation and Intimate Partner Violence

“…17 As 77 percent of contraceptive users in rural areas report public providers as their source of contraceptives, this improved access to public health facilities is likely to enhance access to family planning services. This finding is consistent with Bhalotra et al (2022) who find that parliamentary gender quotas for women in developing countries improve coverage of reproductive health services, including contraceptive services. Furthermore, column 3 indicates that female leaders improve the implementation of programs, such as Janani Suraksha Yojana and Kishori Shakti Yojana, which target maternal and adolescent girls' health, among other services.…”

Synthetic Difference In Differences Estimation

“…We present an example of a staggered adoption design, based on data and the context studied in Bhalotra et al (2022). In this case, the impact of parliamentary gender quotas which reserve seats for women in parliament are estimated, first on rates of women in parliament, and secondly on rates of maternal mortality.…”

“…We then lay out the command syntax of sdid, as well as the elements which are returned to the user. We provide a number of examples to illustrate the use of the SDID method in Stata, both based upon a well-known example of California's passage of Proposition 99, an anti-smoking measure previously presented in Abadie et al (2010); Arkhangelsky et al (2021) in which a single state adopts a treatment at a given time, as well as an example where exposure to a policy occurs at mutiple periods: the case of parliamentary gender quotas studied by Bhalotra et al (2022). We conclude by making a number of practical points on the computational implementation of this estimator.…”

“…This is a subset of the full sample studied inBhalotra et al (2022). Here we only work with countries for which observations of women in parliament and maternal mortality exist for the full time period, without missing observations.…”

When Women Win: Can Female Representation Decrease Gender-Based Violence?

“…Beaman et al (2012), Priyanka (2020) show that female leaders can become role models and expand girls' educational and career aspirations. Female leaders' preferences may also lead to policies that are more liberal, favor redistribution, and benefit children (see, e.g., Brollo and Troiano (2016), Bruce et al (2022), Clots-Figueras (2012), Bhalotra et al (2022), Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras (2014)). They also tend to invest in public goods which are closer to women's concerns (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004), favor "women-friendly" laws (Clots-Figueras, 2011), introduce more bills related to women's issues (Gerrity et al, 2007) and have more active roles on such issues (Lippmann, 2022).…”