Chart of the Week: Tracking Female Political and Economic Exclusion Across the World

By Emanne Khan

The global COVID-19 pandemic, now entering its second year, has upended nearly every aspect of daily life. Large sectors of the labor force transitioned to partially or fully remote work, and other sectors have been hollowed out by layoffs. Women were differentially affected by the economic dynamics and new social demands which emerged amidst the pandemic: consultancy firm McKinsey reported in March 2021 that one in four American women were considering leaving the workforce or scaling back their careers as compared to one in five men, and the Brookings Institution reported in October 2020 that mothers of young children lost 2.2 million jobs that year as compared to 870,000 jobs lost by fathers.

While the past two years saw women around the world face a grave new set of challenges, recent research by Rachel Brulé illuminates the ways women were excluded from full economic rights even before the pandemic. In her 2020 book published by Cambridge University Press, Women, Power and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India, Brulé explores the relationship between political representation and economic empowerment, investigating how India’s quotas for women as heads of local elected government have altered women’s effective claims to fundamental economic rights to inherit property. 

This Chart of the Week, featuring Figure 8.1 from Brulé’s book, identifies trends in women’s political participation (in red) and economic rights (in blue) in four regions of the world between 2009-2016:

Source: Women, Power and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India, Rachel Brulé, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Brulé measured women’s political participation as the percentage of female mayors in each region, compiled from country-specific sources: the Center for American Women and Politics data on the US Conference of Mayors, European Institute for Gender Equality (2019), Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (2019) and Statistics South Africa (2016). Her measure for economic rights–the World Bank’s “Women in Business and Law” (WBL) index–was formulated using data on the degree to which legal statutes differentially constrain women’s economic decisions on a scale ranging from 0 (complete discrimination) to 100 (complete equality). 

Women, power, property and … progress?

The data is illuminating, both in terms of the low ceiling of women’s political achievement globally, as well where it does (and doesn’t) track with women’s economic rights: in none of the four regions studied does the percentage of female mayors top 40 percent, and in none of the four regions does the WBL index top 95. The pessimistic read is that in much of the world, women hold fewer seats than men in local government and have yet to achieve full economic equality.

However, the chart also offers cause for hope: in Latin America and the Caribbean, South Africa and the European Union, women’s representation in local government is positively correlated with growing levels of economic rights. In other words, as the red line (women’s local political representation) rises, so does the blue (women’s economic rights get closer to parity with those of men).

In Women, Power and Property, Brulé identifies quotas for women in government as the bridge linking increased political representation to greater economic rights. Drawing on India as a case study, which has mandated that a third of seats in local government be reserved for women since 1993, Brulé argues quotas empower women to hold pivotal seats at the head of local government where they serve as “gatekeepers,” catalyzing enforcement of women’s rights to inherit property and therefore improving the economic wellbeing of women in their community.

If women’s representation in local government is positively associated with economic rights, why, then, does the United States stand out as an exception? The chart shows that even as the percentage of female mayors in the US has generally trended upwards since 2009, the WBL index has remained static. Brulé has a theory for that, too: she writes that the US’s lack of affirmative action policies on women’s behalf–including quotas for women in government–contributes to the reality that women’s representation is tenuous – rising and falling over time – with a clear economic consequence: women’s economic rights are more limited in the US than in South Africa and the EU, both of which use quotas.

Quotas are not an end-all-be-all solution to women’s exclusion from local government and access to economic rights. There is still much progress to be made until women enjoy full political representation and economic freedom, particularly with progress stalled or rolled back by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, Brulé’s research serves as a reminder that mechanisms exist to help create positive change for women across the world.