Unheard Voices: The Challenge of Inducing Women's Civic Speech

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Strength in Numbers: How Women's Groups Close India's Political Gender Gap

“…They also reported both fear of speaking alone and the expectation that their demands would not be heard unless they entered with a critical mass. It is well documented that women's voices are less likely to be heard and addressed in public spaces, particularly when men dominate positions of political authority (Karpowitz and Mendelberg 2014; Parthasarathy, Rao, and Palaniswamy 2017). Collective participation ensured that they would be seen as politically relevant.…”

“…To test these claims, I document how an intervention aimed at mobilizing women into credit groups has large and meaningful consequences for women's political behavior (Parthasarathy, Rao, and Palaniswamy 2017;Sanyal 2009;Sanyal, Rao, and Majumdar 2015). While the economic consequences of women's credit collectives have been widely studied, the indirect consequences for political engagement remain unclear (Brody et al 2015).…”

Women’s economic status and son preference: empirical evidence from private school enrolment in India

“…As SHGs and SHG federations mature and become institutionalized, they can also slowly acquire legitimacy, much as gram sabhas do: "politicians and bureaucrats learn how to engage with them, citizens learn how to navigate them, and both officials and citizens learn how to manipulate them" (Sanyal and Rao 2018) -amplifying their sustainability and efficacy. There is evidence from India that in states where support for local institutions has historically been high, as in Tamil Nadu, state-mobilized SHG participation increases women's participation in the gram sabha (Parthasarathy et al 2017) -suggesting that the institution is becoming more embedded in wider community consciousness, and acquiring legitimacy as well as collectivizing women to express their interests in wider political fora. Also relevant here is the extensive work of Naila Kabeer on women's agency (e.g.…”

Tan, M; (2021) Evaluating Deliberative Democratic Designs: Theory of Change and Citizens' Assembly Pilot in Lebanon

“…Another innovative method of evaluation was employed in India. A study on India's village assemblies used a text-as-data approach and a structural topic model to quantitively measure differences in participation, agenda-setting power, and dialogic responsiveness between genders and social roles (Parthasarathy et al, 2019). Focusing on the deliverability aspect of deliberative designs, a gap analysis method could be used to pinpoint issues that altered the expectation of deliberation and not just meeting expectations (Flinders and Dommett, 2013).…”