In the Blog

Overworked and underappreciated

December 2nd, 2007     by Allison Martell     Comments

Slate has a fascinating article up about women in politics. It looks at a study on the impact of female leadership on village councils in India. Guess what? Villages with more women in power have more and higher quality public services. There’s more:

They were also less corrupt – villagers with female-headed councils were 25 percent less likely to report having to pay bribes to access basic services like getting ration cards or receiving medical attention.

But female leaders didn’t get much recognition:

India’s female pradhans were remarkably unappreciated for their efforts. Despite the objective upgrades in village amenities, both men and women living in villages headed by women expressed lower satisfaction with public services.

I like this piece because it explains not just the results of the study, but its design, and the reasoning behind that design. There are even a couple intelligent criticisms in the comment section. For example, were these women resented because they were put in power partly by an affirmative action program?

Tags: on the job

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