Ce qui fonctionne pour la participation politique et le leadership des femmes

WHAT WORKS FOR WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND LEADERSHIP USAID/HAITI DISCLAIMER: The authors' views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. Written and prepared by Saad Gulzar and Soledad Artiz Prillaman, consultants with The Cloudburst Group (Cloudburst), with research support from Makayla Barker, a Research Analyst at Cloudburst. This document was produced for review by the United States Agency for International Development, Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Center under the Learning, Evaluation, and Research Activity II (LER II) contract: GS10F0218U/7200AA18M00017. Prepared by: The Cloudburst Group 8400 Corporate Drive, Suite 550 Landover, MD 20785-2238 Tel: 301-918-4440 CONTENTS ACRONYMS IV EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1 CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: INDIVIDUAL RESOURCES 1 CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL NORMS 2 CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS 3 DISCUSSION 3 1. INTRODUCTION 4 2. SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY 4 3. CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: INDIVIDUAL RESOURCES 6 3.1. OVERVIEW AND FRAMEWORK 6 3.2 INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE OF POLITICAL SYSTEMS 7 3.3 INCOME AND LABOR MARKET PARTICIPATION 9 3.4 FREE TIME AND DOMESTIC RESPONSIBILITIES 11 3.5 SOCIAL CAPITAL AND NETWORKS 11 3.6 OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES 13 4. CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL NORMS 13 4.1 FRAMEWORK: FROM THE PERSONAL TO THE COMMUNITY 13 4.2. INDIVIDUAL ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS 14 4.3. HOUSEHOLD CONSTRAINTS 18 4.4. COMMUNITY AND CULTURAL NORMS 20 4.5. OPPORTUNITIES AND OPEN QUESTIONS 22 5. CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS 23 5.1 FRAMEWORK ON INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS: MACRO-INSTITUTIONS AS GUARANTEEING AND/OR SUPPORTING WPPL 23 5.2 IMPROVING REPRESENTATION IN POLITICAL PARTIES: ACTIONS BY SENIOR LEADERSHIP 23 5.3 LEGAL PROTECTIONS 25 5.4 OPPORTUNITIES AND OPEN QUESTIONS 26 6. DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS: BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER 27 REFERENCES 32 iii | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV ACRONYMS DRC Democratic Republic of Congo ET Evaluation team UNDP United Nations Development Programme WPPL Women’s political participation and leadership iv | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This evidence review presents existing research on why the gender gap in political participation and leadership persists and opportunities for the United States Agency for International Development to undertake programming that addresses it. The research team surveyed more than 220 articles and books using rigorous and replicable methodologies, the vast majority of which were written within the last 20 years, with some of the most credible evidence emerging within the last 5–10 years. The evidence shows that the gender gap in political participation and leadership is a function of individual resources, social norms, and institutions. These factors interact to create a social system that inhibits women’s political authority in complex ways. CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: INDIVIDUAL RESOURCES The most commonly cited explanation for women’s varying levels of political participation is rooted in gender inequalities in access to the resources generated in the process of economic development. Resource-based explanations focus on the way money, education, and time shape political engagement. In analyzing the existing evidence base, the ET identified four key resources that may shape individual women's political participation and leadership (WPPL): information and knowledge of political systems, income and labor market participation, free time and domestic responsibilities, and social capital and networks. Information and knowledge of political systems: Previous literature argues that knowledge of and information about how politics works and how to engage in political systems are critical drivers of political participation. To address these concerns, capacity-building programs have been deployed to fill the gaps in women’s political knowledge and skills. These programs use targeted short-term informational interventions with the assumption that by providing key political skills, they can overcome some of the entrenched knowledge gaps due to unequal access to schooling, inequalities in networks, and less access to economic opportunities. There is evidence that these programs can work, but only if they are designed to address coinciding constraints on WPPL, such as restrictive norms and inequalities in social capital, if such programs activate or exacerbate gender-biased norms. Without simultaneous norm-targeted interventions, interventions may in fact worsen gender gaps in political participation. Understanding the mechanisms and conditions of women's empowerment would enable more effective and sustainable program design. Income and labor market participation: While economic development and growth may be positively correlated with women’s political participation in some developing regions, the available evidence suggests that income-generating programs that fail to address and include gender norm change do not meaningfully change women’s political participation. The key constraint to these programs being effective appears to be gender-biased social norms. This suggests that norm-based constraints are more binding for WPPL than resource-based constraints, and highlights the importance of building norm based interventions into resource-based interventions. Free time and domestic responsibilities: Although it has been suggested that women do not participate in politics simply because they do not have sufficient free time to do so given the many demands placed on their time for household duties, the evaluation team’s (ET’s) search of the literature revealed no programs that evaluated the impact of interventions aimed at addressing time poverty on WPPL. Social capital and networks: Social capital theorists have long attributed variance in political behavior and broader political outcomes to the level and structure of social capital and networks. The most common forms of women’s groups for which the link with WPPL has been rigorously studied are groups organized 1 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV for economic purposes, such as microcredit, which have been shown to substantially boost women citizens’ political participation. While women do not opt into these groups with the intention of gaining access to politics, and groups were not organized to explicitly target increasing political participation, the groups provide women with social capital, and social capital among women leads to political participation. Social capital is also very important for women political leaders because it allows them access to mentors. Social capital among women appears to be one of the most critical resources for women in navigating political participation and leadership. CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL NORMS Patriarchy and gender-biased social norms have been shown to shape and constrain women’s political behavior. The literature on the impact of social norms on women’s status in society has focused on the role of social norms, attitudes, and beliefs in perpetuating women’s relegation to the private and domestic spheres and the elevation and naturalization of men as public sphere actors and leaders. In this review of what has been studied to produce evidence, the ET has identified three evidence-based domains where norm-based constraints operate: individual attitudes and beliefs, household relations, and community norms and cultural institutions. Individual attitudes and beliefs: For individual women, the internalization of patriarchal norms (norms of male dominance) and stereotypes about women’s political participation contribute to low beliefs of self efficacy in political domains, limited aspirations around political participation, and disinclination to participate in politics and vote for women candidates. Research from around the globe has shown that as women gain more and more representation in political office, the aspirations of other women grow and individuals positively update their beliefs about women’s capacity for political success. This work highlights the usefulness of role models (social referents signaling the acceptability of WPPL), corrections of misperceived beliefs, school-based trainings on gender equality, and radio programs on gender equality. Household constraints: Women’s autonomy from the household, or the ability to act and exert agency independent of the household, is a very important driver of their political participation. Other research has found that men serve as gatekeepers to women’s political participation and are a critical node for interventions aimed at increasing WPPL. Promising interventions include vote mobilization campaigns focused on the value of women’s participation, delayed marriage, women’s groups, and gender sensitization discussion groups. Community and cultural norms: Patriarchal cultural norms and patrilineage are one of the most deeply rooted drivers of women’s subordination, through the way that it structures both access to resources and coordination around political participation. Moreover, even once women are able to participate in political spaces, they often face substantial barriers to being heard and having their needs met. These barriers are likely to inhibit women’s participation in the first place, as women may see little benefit in engaging in politics if it is unlikely to respond to their demands, in addition to the violent and non-violent sanctions they may face for political participation. Changes to inheritance laws may foster norm change and subsequently WPPL, although such legal changes may have unintended consequences that exacerbate gender inequalities. As noted elsewhere, women’s groups and other activities that build social capital can help women to gain access and representation in community institutions. These activities may generate backlash to efforts to empower women and must provide women with tools to navigate and stand against that response. 2 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS Institutional accounts of political behavior suggest that political institutions and organizations set the rules for how norms and inequalities of male dominance are translated into political power. Moving beyond the individual and the community as the units of analysis, institutional determinants focus instead on organizational and super-structures that create conditions for the continued dearth of women’s leadership in politics, while also opening space for more large-scale transformation of WPPL. Improving representation in political parties: Women remain underrepresented in party infrastructure around the world. This creates a multitude of problems that both upset the party’s own election prospects while also weakening representation overall. Overall, there is a lack of research on interventions to address institutional constraints to WPPL. What research there is suggests that party recruitment practices, absent a gender-conscious design, may not be successful in addressing women's underrepresentation as political candidates. Legal protections: Other institutional constraints include the underrepresentation of women as political candidates and the underrepresentation of women in political party positions. Research has shown that enabling women to get elected improves democratic outcomes. There is evidence to suggest that the status quo is actively inhibiting qualified women from entering politics and gender quotas and proportional representation systems can help break entrenched power structures and enable qualified women to rise in office. DISCUSSION The bulk of evidence discussed here suggests that there is significantly more research addressing resources as a constraint to WPPL, with considerably less research on norms and political institutions, where rigorous evidence-gathering can be particularly fruitful. However, the ET also found gaps in the evidence on all three factors and suggests important questions for future research to expand the evidence base on what works in WPPL programming. 3 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV 1. INTRODUCTION Across the globe, women remain underrepresented in political spaces: female citizens are 3.5 percent less likely to vote and 10 percent less likely to participate in politics in between elections than men (World Values Surveys Waves 5 and 6) and still only 26 percent of parliamentarians are women (as of data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union for November 2022). Why does a gender gap in political participation and leadership persist and what can the United States Agency for International Development do about it? Existing answers focus on three key areas of constraints to WPPL: individual resources, social norms, and institutions. Individual accounts focus on the role of resources—time, money, and civic skills—in explaining political behavior. Social or cultural accounts highlight the role of norms, attitudes, and beliefs in perpetuating the subversion of women to domestic responsibilities and the elevation of men as political actors. Institutional accounts identify the ways that political institutions confer power and access to some in the population and constrain others. The gender gap in political participation and leadership is undoubtedly a function of all three of these constraints—resources, norms, and institutions—which interact to create a social system that inhibits women’s political authority. While it is important to acknowledge the complexity of this social problem, improvements in WPPL have been linked to particular interventions targeting specific factors. In fact, recent decades have seen the expansion of specific programs and interventions aimed at addressing these persistent gender-based political inequities. A review of the efficacy of these programs and interventions is, therefore, timely. This review aims to provide an understanding of what has and has not worked in improving WPPL through targeted programming. 2. SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY The focus of this review is on WPPL. This includes political participation, or any form of public action that seeks to influence political decision-making, including formal forms of political participation involving direct engagement with political institutions, like voting and claims-making, and informal forms of participation seeking to indirectly influence political institutions, like protesting. It also includes political leadership, which is the direct representation of women in positions of political authority.1 Few research studies to date have measured or evaluated all aspects of WPPL, instead focusing on the one or two most relevant dimensions. Particular operationalizations of WPPL described in this review include electoral and non-electoral political participation, political interest and discussion, political candidacy and representation, and political influence. To understand what has and has not worked to improve WPPL, the focus of this review is on evaluating the evidence on the efficacy of external interventions2 in gaining traction on gender inequities in political participation and leadership. This review of recent literature identifies areas in which each of the three core theoretical dimensions have progressed over the last few decades, paying particular attention to 1 This reviews conceptualizes political participation as any form of public that seeks to directly engage the state. This includes formal forms of political participation, like voting and claims-making, alongside informal forms of participation that make demands on the state, like protesting. While the focus of this work is on political participation and leadership, other work of the United States Agency for International Development focuses on broader definitions of public engagement and civic action, including labor unions, reporting and journalism, defense of human rights, etc. 2 An external intervention is defined as any programming with an intention of changing an outcome that does not arise organically from the community of participants themselves. 4 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV work that brings rigor to establishing an evidence base from which subsequent work and programming can springboard. To ensure this review achieves its goal of generating evidence around actionable programs targeting WPPL, the review is focused and limited to studies 1) with clear theories of change, 2) that are focused on external intervention, and 3) that utilize rigorous and replicable methodologies. First, this review focuses on interventions rooted in theories of change, both to note constraints to WPPL and highlight what has worked to improve WPPL outcomes in the past. Second, a focus on interventions is also a departure from previous reviews of this kind in that the approach here centers on actions implemented with women by actors either external or internal to the political landscape and the degree to which they are likely to be effective. Third, this review is limited to work deemed rigorous by scientific standards, particularly standards of evidence associated with the causal evaluation of external interventions. The standards for drawing valid and reliable conclusions of whether a program/intervention works for a specific outcome are more stringent than those applied to simply mapping the problem or understanding what attributes might correlate with the outcome of interest. Given the stringency of these standards and the need for sufficiently large study sizes to draw valid conclusions, the vast majority of the studies summarized utilize quantitative research methodologies, though this report does include qualitative methodologies insofar as they meet the aforementioned criteria. The focus on rigorous evidence serves two purposes. It ensures that the results described herein are subject to standards for scientific research and, therefore, have internal validity. It also provides clear limits on inclusion in the review, which is helpful when setting parameters given the proliferation of studies that link various individual, societal, and institutional attributes to gender inequalities in political participation and leadership. Our focus on what has been proven to work implies the need to evaluate causality—the role of a particular attribute (intervention) on WPPL. Defining the scope of this review to studies that meet this standard of evidence provides clear inclusion criteria and highlights where such evidence remains severely lacking. A particular benefit of this inclusion criteria is that it clearly delineates areas where there is an availability of rigorous evidence on WPPL from areas where further rigorous work is needed. This should serve as an important input into future policy design and activism. This focus precludes a lot of important work that aims to describe the fundamental causes of gender gaps in WPPL around the world, as well as work and anecdotal evidence generated directly by activists, implementers, and other stakeholders on these gaps (see Kabeer 2020 for a larger discussion). Some research is excluded because the nature of inquiry is fundamentally at odds with an interventionist approach, such as the mapping of historical processes and structural transformation (see, for example, work by Htun and Weldon) and the documentation of legislative processes (see, for example, work by Bjarnegård). Additionally, this report excludes substantial research produced by activist and implementing organizations that has provided meaningful insights into the barriers to and strategies for change for WPPL through individualized case studies that examine a small number of cases. However, in its focus on interventions that scientifically generate evidence on successful strategies to improve the seemingly intractable gender gaps in politics around the world, this evidence review identifies particular success stories and areas where evidence is weak but promising in order to document the most robust evidence on what works for WPPL. Abiding by these criteria, the ET identified and selected intervention-focused research studies and evaluations that addressed one or more of the theorized constraints impeding WPPL: individual resources, social norms, and political institutions. In total, the ET surveyed more than 220 articles and books, the vast majority of which were written within the last 20 years, with some of the most credible evidence 5 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV emerging within the last 5–10 years. This review includes all evaluations done using rigorous empirical methods, namely randomized and natural experiments. Where such evidence is lacking, which is in many domains, the ET supplements its analysis with studies that acknowledge scientific methods but draw on observational correlations from public opinion surveys and qualitative assessments of programs, highlighting the methods used for evaluation and the limitations of these studies. The ET reviews this literature in the remaining section, broadly placing the literature in theoretically and policy-relevant frames and identifying opportunities and challenges for both future research and programming. The ET also pays attention to the locations from which evidence emerges and points to the challenge of relying too much on evidence only from data-rich environments or places where social structures are already quite permissive. The team summarizes the state of the rigorous evidence along three axes of constraint for WPPL: individual resources, norms, and political institutions. Each section highlights the state of the most robust knowledge as well as open questions where there is a dearth of rigorous evidence. In addition to showing where the bulk of current evidence exists, namely, resources, the lengths of these sections also indicate there is considerably less research on norms and political institutions, both areas where rigorous evidence-gathering can be particularly fruitful. The ET concludes by offering a broad discussion of common themes across these three axes and what this teaches about how to increase WPPL. 3. CONSTRAINTS TO WPPL: INDIVIDUAL RESOURCES 3.1. OVERVIEW AND FRAMEWORK The most commonly cited explanation for women’s varying levels of political participation is rooted in gender inequalities in access to the resources generated in the process of economic development. Drawing largely on evidence from high-income democracies, such theories assume that economic prosperity will yield political inclusion, and it is the gendered lag in access to such economic prosperity that perpetuates women’s exclusion. First, resource-based explanations focus on the way money, education, and time shape political engagement. Therefore, the gender gap in political participation is argued to be the result of a gender gap in resources. To a greater degree than men, women have not accumulated the political and non-political resources necessary to reduce the costs of political participation. Gender gaps in resources stem from gendered patterns of access to social and economic institutions. On average, women have less education, lower labor force participation, lower wages, and less free time than men. Each of these factors is associated with less political participation and a lower likelihood of political leadership. The link between resources and political participation is direct, as many forms of participation directly require resources to engage, and indirect, as participation in social and economic institutions like schools and the labor market inculcate civic skills useful for political participation. This argument implies that, as resources equalize, so does political participation. In analyzing the existing evidence base, the ET identified four key resources that may shape individual women's participation and leadership in politics: information and knowledge of political systems, income and labor market participation, free time and domestic responsibilities, and social capital and networks. This review describes the theoretical value of each of these resources and why they might increase WPPL, then discusses interventions that have been deployed to ameliorate the negative consequences of the lack of those resources. It is important to highlight, however, that most research on individual resource constraints has focused on capacity-building across all types of countries. As a result, very few on-the-ground interventions have 6 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV sought to address inequalities in individual resources with the explicit aim of increasing WPPL. While there is a large evidence base on interventions to increase women’s labor market participation, for example, few have looked at how such interventions shape subsequent political behavior. This review focuses only on those interventions that explicitly measure WPPL as a key outcome. The ET suggests that future evaluations of interventions aimed at directly improving individual women’s resources expand the scope of their evaluation to include an assessment of effects on political participation and leadership. 3.2 INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE OF POLITICAL SYSTEMS Problem: Limited knowledge of political systems and limited skills. Studied solutions: Knowledge and capacity-building programs. Previous literature argues that knowledge of and information about how politics works and how to engage in political systems are critical drivers of political participation. Without information about how to navigate political systems, including formal political institutions and informal sites of political exchange and deliberation, political participation is challenging. Essentially, knowledge of political processes and information about current events can lower the costs of political participation. Similarly, civic skills, or the communications and organizational skills useful to political action, have been argued to importantly condition individuals’ capacity for political participation and leadership, such as by facilitating interaction with formal political institutions (Brady et al, 1995). Low levels of political information and civic skills are particularly challenging for those seeking political leadership positions, which require navigating complex bureaucratic and party institutions (Afridi et al, 2017). Yet, historical inequalities in access to education have been shown to lead to a gender gap in political information and knowledge (Burns et al, 2004; Lizotte and Sidman, 2009). For example, Dim and Asomah (2019) study the correlates of women’s political participation using data from the Afrobarometer and find that education is one of the strongest predictors of women’s political participation in Nigeria. To address these concerns, capacity-building programs have been deployed to fill the gaps in women’s political knowledge and skills. These programs use targeted short-term informational interventions with the assumption that by providing key political skills, they can overcome some of the entrenched knowledge gaps due to unequal access to schooling, inequalities in networks, and less access to economic opportunities. One such program, implemented in Mali using a randomized experiment, provided information and training on local government capacity and responsibility and delivered information to men and women about how local politicians were performing. In an evaluation of this program, Gottlieb (2016a) found that participants had greater knowledge of politics—particularly of their political representatives— following participation in the program, but that when women and men were provided with political information in a context of gender-biased social norms, rather than that knowledge equalizing the gender gap in political behavior, women participated less in politics than they had before (Gottlieb 2016b). In this intervention, men and women jointly participated in a three-day civics course. While both men and women showed increased knowledge of politics following the course, only men’s participation in political events increased and women’s instead decreased. Drawing on qualitative evidence from male and female participants, Gottlieb finds that women recognized that their participation in the civics course was a deviation from the prevailing social norm where women relegated all political participation to men, with one woman stating that “an educated woman will forget that she is inferior to men and could even fail to obey her husband” (Gottlieb 2016b, 103). In some cases, the paper notes that women faced sanctions and threats from within the household if they were to follow the course material and participate in politics. Gottlieb (2016b, 104) argues that this is indicative of the “resource paradox,” where simply providing information can have negative consequences in societies with conservative norms. However, as the paper notes, gender norms in Mali are amongst the worst in Africa and almost no women in the study sample participated in politics prior to the intervention. 7 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV Similar capacity-building programs delivered to groups of only women have proven to be more effective at increasing women’s political participation in a quasi-experimental evaluation in India (Prillaman 2022).3 In this gender-transformative intervention, women who were already members of women-only credit collectives participated in a capacity-building program focused on civics education and gender empowerment delivered in several multi-day sessions over a two-year period. Women who participated in this program, as compared to women who were members of similar credit collectives in villages that did not receive this program, were substantially more likely to participate in politics, including attending village meetings and contacting local elected representatives. Importantly, the study shows that this program increased women’s knowledge of political rights and entitlements and also strengthened bonds of solidarity and collective action among women’s group members, but did not change women’s reported attitudes toward gender equality. In combination, this suggests that such a program improved women’s political participation by filling information gaps and by building social capital but may not have immediately transformed community gender norms. The studies by Prillaman (2022) in India and by Gottlieb (2016b) in Mali are difficult to compare as the intervention in India was delivered over two years and the Mali program lasted only three days. It is difficult to disentangle whether the success of the Indian intervention was because of the information provided in the capacity-building program or the social capital generated as a result of sustained participation. There are some important additional differences. First, it could be that gender norms in India were less restrictive than those in Mali. However, the study shows that restrictions on women in India were akin to those in Mali, suggesting that the overall normative environment is unlikely to be the core driver of the difference. That said, the women who participated in the program in India were those who had previously been able to join credit collectives and so the program’s efficacy may have been in part because these women had some baseline level of empowerment to build upon. Second, unlike in the Malian program that included mixed groups of both men and women, the Indian program included only women. As a result, men had less information about the content of the trainings. Including only women may have also helped foster the development of social capital among women. In fact, as Prillaman (2022) finds, women who participated in the Indian program did experience backlash from men in their households and in their communities in the form of threats and violence, but they leveraged the social capital they generated through the dialogue during the program to help them to navigate and combat this backlash. This highlights a third potential distinction: the Indian capacity-building program had a longer intervention period. Capacity-building programs have been even more widely deployed to help women political leaders gain the knowledge and information they need to successfully perform their responsibilities, particularly given lower levels of experience in political spaces. These capacity-building programs typically involve multiple components such as training, mentorship, networking, and broader community outreach that make it difficult to attribute outcomes directly to the provision of information. In the ET’s review of the literature, the team did not find an experimental evaluation of a capacity-building program delivered to women political leaders. Most evaluations of these capacity-building programs have been programmatic and qualitative in nature and further evidence is needed to confirm the scientific merit of the findings from these programs. That said, capacity-building programs, when designed with an appreciation of prevailing norms, show promise toward making progress in helping women to navigate positions of political leadership. Programs implemented by several organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan, and South Sudan, evaluated using small-scale qualitative evidence without clear comparison groups, appeared to improve women parliamentarians’ ability to perform their responsibilities and enable women parliamentarians to advocate and advance their agendas, including policies focused on women’s issues (Khan and Hussein, 2014; Howell, 3 Qualitative evaluations have revealed similar outcomes in Sierra Leone (Conteh, 2019), South Sudan (Venturi et al, 2021), and Sri Lanka with adolescent girls (Maddumage, 2021). 8 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV 2012; Chikoore and Abu-Hasabo, 2015; Catalla and Kong, 2009). These programs were not designed to address barriers to entry, but rather the ability of women to lead once they are in office. That said, one such program implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Pakistan found that the capacity-building program was only successful for women leaders who had sufficient pre-existing civic skills and ties to influential political elites—instead, many women seemed no better able at navigating political systems after the program (Khan and Zia, 2004). Similar to the citizen program in Mali, this program in Pakistan lasted three days. Khan and Zia (2004) highlight that some women, particularly those who were illiterate or only semi-literate, did not remember the information they had received and other women felt abandoned following the conclusion of the program. Subsequent sections discuss how the development of women’s networks can facilitate the production of pre conditions to success, such as civic skills and ties. Knowledge and capacity-building programs have been deployed to help both women citizens and women political leaders learn about the political process and correct gender inequities in access to political information. For female citizens, evidence suggests that the efficacy of these programs varies substantially based on how they are designed and implemented. There is evidence that these programs can work, but only if they are designed to address coinciding constraints on WPPL, such as restrictive norms and inequalities in social capital, if such programs activate or exacerbate gender-biased norms. Without simultaneous norm-targeted interventions, interventions may in fact worsen gender gaps in political participation. For women who have already overcome barriers to becoming a formal/elected leader, more evidence is needed to understand whether, how, and under what conditions these programs work to empower women elected representatives. Especially given the widespread deployment of such capacity building programs, rigorous evidence is critically needed to determine both whether these programs achieve their intended goals and whether they, like some citizen-focused capacity-building programs, have unintended consequences that might even exacerbate problems. Important in this evidence generation would be an intentional focus on disentangling the component pieces of capacity-building and understanding when/how they combine to effectively improve WPPL. Understanding the mechanisms and conditions of women's empowerment would enable more effective and sustainable program design. 3.3 INCOME AND LABOR MARKET PARTICIPATION Problem: Inequalities in economic resources and labor force participation. Studied solutions: Microcredit programs, community-driven development programs, and unconditional cash transfer programs. In addition to needing information to participate in politics, political participation—and particularly political leadership—may require economic resources. Studying the U.S., Schlozman et al (1994) argue that inequalities in financial resources and control over those financial resources play an important role in women’s political participation, even more so than that of free time and education. They argue that the relationship between income and political participation is driven by two factors: access to money and greater control of household finances. Ultimately, the argument is that access to some base amount of income is critical for individuals to be able to turn their attention to politics and engage in political spaces. For women, this is more acute as income buys both access to politics and freedom from the household. This highlights how the theoretical link between economic resources and political participation is rooted in both access to resources and control, at both the household and community levels, over existing economic resources. These arguments, however, have largely emerged from evidence from advanced, industrialized democracies. Inequalities in both labor force participation and wage earnings persist in much of the developing world, leading women to earn less on average than men in most societies. Do these economic inequalities 9 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV perpetuate political inequalities? The answer is largely no. Desposato and Norrander (2009) use the Latinobarómetro public opinion survey to look at the national-level correlation between economic development and women’s political participation in Latin America and find no correlation.4 Few studies have been able to provide robust evidence on the direct impact of economic transfers on political participation, with the closest being a focus on financial inclusion interventions. Prillaman (2021) analyzes a natural experiment in the roll-out of a microcredit program in India targeted at women and shows that while the program significantly increased women’s political participation, it was not because it had meaningful impacts on women’s livelihoods and income. In fact, the program appeared to have virtually no impact on women’s economic resources. Instead, this program shifted women’s political participation by providing access to networks of other women (see section 3.5 below for more information). That said, analyzing data from the Afrobarometer public opinion survey, Isaksson et al (2014) do find a positive correlation between individual economic resource endowments and employment with women’s political participation, though they highlight that this explains only a very small share of the gender gap in political participation. It is difficult from a non-causal study to identify whether it is economic resources per se that are positively related to political participation, or the myriad of non economic characteristics that correlate with economic resources. In fact, Isaksson et al (2004) find that norms and political networks have much stronger and more predictive correlations with WPPL. Another intervention aimed at increasing women’s access to and control over financial resources is that of community-driven development programs. Some of these programs, which transfer cash and other economic resources to community groups, addressed political participation directly by requiring women’s participation as a condition of the transfer. Others did so indirectly, theorizing that increasing women’s financial power alone would stimulate greater political engagement and leadership by women. The literature shows that community-driven development programs that addressed political participation directly had mixed levels of success, but those relying on economic resource transfer alone did not have an impact on women’s political engagement. As with capacity-building programs, this suggests that such programs are unlikely to achieve their intended goals if they only target economic constraints to WPPL and instead likely need to address other coincident constraints on WPPL, most notably restrictive gender norms and attitudes. Studying the randomized rollout of a community-driven development program that mandated women’s representation in 500 villages in Afghanistan, Beath et al (2013) find that the program did increase women’s political participation, specifically the existence of women’s councils and the identification of women political leaders in the village. The program increased women’s income-generating activities but did not fundamentally alter their status in household decision-making. It also shifted attitudes about whether women should participate in politics, suggesting some changes in normative beliefs, though it did not change more general attitudes around women’s role in society. It is impossible to know from this study whether this program yielded improvements in women’s political leadership because of women’s greater economic activities or shifts in attitudes about the acceptability of women’s work. A similar randomized program in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) finds only very weak evidence that participation in community-driven development programs increases women’s political participation and similarly finds no effect on general attitudes around the role of women or women’s role in household decision-making (van der Windt, 2018). Beardon and Otero (2013) also report mixed qualitative impacts on women’s political participation from a large-scale rollout of an Oxfam program that built political quotas in its implementation. One key conclusion from these papers is that community-driven development programs appear to only increase WPPL when program participation shifts attitudes around women’s political authority. 4 Instead, they show that having more women in the political elite is positively correlated with the political participation of female citizens. 10 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV While economic development and growth may be positively correlated with women’s political participation in some developing regions, the available evidence suggests that income-generating programs that fail to address and include gender norm change do not meaningfully change women’s political participation. The key constraint to these programs being effective appears to be gender-biased social norms. This suggests that norm-based constraints are more binding for WPPL than resource-based constraints, and highlights the importance of building norm-based interventions into resource-based interventions. 3.4 FREE TIME AND DOMESTIC RESPONSIBILITIES Problem: Time poverty due to the double bind of political participation and domestic work. Studied solutions: n/a. In patriarchal societies, women are assigned the responsibility of caring for the home while men are responsible for earning income. As a result, many have suggested that women do not participate in politics simply because they do not have sufficient free time to do so given all of the many demands placed on their time (Burns et al, 2004). These concerns are exacerbated when women are balancing both labor force participation and domestic duties. For aspiring women leaders, time poverty poses a double challenge: it directly limits their available time to take on political positions, yet women, unlike men, are preferred by voters if they have children. Teele et al (2018) show in a survey experiment with voters in the U.S. that women political leaders are preferred in a hypothetical election when they are married and have children. Their results imply that women are more likely to be elected to leadership roles if they have children and, as a result, women leaders are likely to face a “double bind” where they must balance domestic responsibilities and the demands of a political leadership career. It is the requirement of this balance that leads many women, they argue, to opt out of politics. The promise of these arguments is that women would participate in politics more if they had more time or programs that help to alleviate their domestic responsibilities. The ET’s search of the literature revealed no programs that evaluated the impact of interventions aimed at addressing time poverty on WPPL. This indicates a lack of evidence on what the impact of addressing time poverty would be on WPPL. Given that women, particularly aspiring women leaders, articulate that time poverty constrains their political participation (Burns et al, 2004), future programming and research should evaluate the impact of alleviating this constraint on increasing WPPL, as well as what interventions or strategies would be most effective. 3.5 SOCIAL CAPITAL AND NETWORKS Problem: Inequalities in social capital and social networks. Studied solutions: Women’s groups and mentorship programs. Social capital theorists have long attributed variance in political behavior and broader political outcomes to the level and structure of social capital and networks. Putnam (2000) defines social capital as the “features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” The idea is that whom one knows and whom one is connected to affects what one wants, what one does, and how one does it. Highly patriarchal societies are marked by large gender inequalities in social capital. These gender inequalities manifest at both the micro level, with women having fewer social ties than men, and at the meso level, where men’s networks are denser and have higher levels of trust and coordination than women’s networks. Inequalities in social capital at all levels have been argued to drive inequalities in political participation. 11 | WWPL EVIDENCE REVIEW USAID.GOV The most common forms of women’s groups for which the link with WPPL has been rigorously studied are groups organized for economic purposes, such as microcredit.5 Given inequalities in social capital, the formation of such women’s groups has been shown to substantially boost women citizens’ political participation in local politics. While political participation is not the intended goal of these groups nor a reason for which women opt into group participation, the regular convening of such groups has been shown to foster the development of social capital among women (Feigenberg et al, 2010). As mentioned above, Prillaman (2021) shows that participation in such groups increases women’s political participation—particularly non-electoral political participation like community meeting attendance and claims-making—in her study of a natural experiment in India that arbitrarily determined which villages had access to the self-help group mobilization program. Importantly, women did not opt into these groups with the intention of gaining access to politics, nor did group organization explicitly target increasing political participation. This suggests that one of the key values of women’s groups lies in the fact that they provide women with social capital, and social capital among women leads to political participation. While capacity-building and community-driven development programs in some instances led to reductions in women’s political participation despite it being a direct aim of the programs, participation in women’s groups, even when not directly focused on politics, enabled women’s political participation because it provided a mechanism to combat backlash due to restrictive gender norms. Women’s group members deployed their newfound social capital to contest the resistance they face to their political inclusion. An observational study of women’s group participation across five states in India has shown similar effects (Kumar et al, 2019). Most of the evidence on the efficacy of women’s groups comes from South Asia, particularly when focusing on political impacts; however, Brody et al (2015) show similar effects of women’s group participation on social capital in Africa and Southeast Asia. More evidence is needed to understand whether this social capital translates into political participation in contexts with varying gender norms. For individual women political leaders, networks have also