Increasing the Number of Women in Politics in India Doesn’t Guarantee Their Voices Will be Heard

In conversation with SIL’s Kate Green Tripp, Dr. Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and Dr. Nivedita Narain, formerly CEO of Charities Aid Foundation India and currently Senior Research Advisor at Transform Rural India Foundation (TRIF), discuss their joint research project dedicated to advancing women’s political representation in local Indian politics.

Kate Green Tripp: What is the social problem your project addresses?

Soledad Artiz Prillaman: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals enshrined our global commitment to gender equality, yet we have failed to make significant progress. With just six years to go on the roadmap set forth in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, not one of the gender indicators has been met. 

So much of the focus on gender equality centers on shifting women’s outcomes, but, as the recent Nobel in Economics reminds us, institutions are critical for achieving our goals. 

Our work thinks about how you build gender inclusive institutions so that you get gender inclusive policies (and ultimately better outcomes for women). We focus on India’s local political institutions, which include more than 3 million elected officials and the world’s largest quota policy for women ensuring more than 1 million women hold office. Yet despite this, we show that women’s voices are still not heard as much as men’s. 

The reality of women’s political representation is particularly concerning in rural regions where the term “pati sarpanch” has been coined, referring to the husband of a female elected representative who serves as her proxy and who really holds political authority. This suggests that simply increasing the number of women in political institutions doesn’t guarantee that their voices will be heard. So how do we do it? That’s what our team, a collaboration between Stanford’s Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab and Transform Rural India, are dedicated to figuring out.

Nivedita Narain: The persistence of the challenges Solé has highlighted is of particular concern, especially considering how much progress has been made on women’s representation in India’s local self-governance (PRI) institutions over the past three decades. 

Electoral gender quotas have brought more women into political office, and the proliferation of women’s groups (SHGs) have led to a major shift in women’s engagement in rural local politics. We’ve seen that SHGs, of which there are over 100 million members in India today, lead women to participate more often in village assembly meetings and to interact more with government officials.

The objective of gender empowerment initiatives cannot just be about getting women into seats; it must be about ensuring women have a real say in governance. Our project aims to dig deeper into understanding why women remain underrepresented, especially in local self-governance institutions. 

While we’ve seen the rise of initiatives like SHGs, we need to explore the systemic barriers that still prevent women from exercising their authority as governing officials and from participating in political processes as citizens. We believe that by examining these barriers, we can find ways to make existing institutions work better for women.

Kate: What has your data revealed thus far?

Soledad: This year, our research team surveyed 865 local governments and over 16,000 respondents across two Indian states. One of our key findings is that many gender empowerment initiatives are based on a traditional view of politics as a representative democracy, which doesn’t reflect the realities of local governance in India. 

We discovered that local politics often operates more like a family affair, where official governing responsibilities are often shared by the family members of elected representatives, for both male and female elected officials. The common practice among elected representatives of sharing their governing power across their households has important consequences for women given the traditional patriarchal structure of most households. 

Political authority mirrors household authority and, if there is an existing power imbalance between men and women in the home, the distribution of political authority follows suit.

Nivedita: Solé’s model of family-centered politics is supported by the data we’ve collected this year. We see that an overwhelming 95% of elected leaders involve their family members in their official duties, which indicates that the sharing or distribution of political power within families is widespread. As Solé has noted, this can create significant authority gaps between men and women within the families of elected representatives. Male representatives often hold more power than women who hold those same positions, and men can leverage this norm to increase their authority at the expense of women’s authority. 

While nearly all elected leaders share responsibility for their official duties, men are much more likely to take help from other men in their families than from women. And most troublingly, we find that 89% of male leaders report having the final say over official governance decisions, while only 43% of women could say the same. 

The gendered authority gap has consequences for elected representatives’ political relationships and behavior. We see, for example, that female sarpanches have fewer interactions with citizens in their panchayats and with other elected representatives. Citizens are far more likely to report problems to male elected representatives across all kinds of public service demands, and female citizens feel more difficulty speaking with all sarpanches – male or female.

Kate:  What does this illustrate?

Soledad: Our research highlights that quotas bring women to tables they would otherwise not sit at, but don’t ensure that they sit at the head of the table. And if women don’t hold real power, then it is unlikely that policy is going to reflect their unique demands. Even more, women citizens have less contact with elected officials than men but also don’t contact women elected officials. 

If inclusive politics begets inclusive policy, a fundamental premise of our work and with a wide body of evidence to support, then the key is figuring out how you get truly inclusive politics. As many as 130 countries have adopted gender quotas under the assumption that having more women in office will lead to better advocacy for women’s issues. However, our research underscores a critical flaw in this approach of targeting gender parity alone: without addressing the underlying cultural and structural barriers, simply increasing the number of women in politics does not translate to genuine empowerment or representation.

Nivedita: The sentiments expressed by women in our study region illustrate this point vividly. One of the women we spoke with noted that when women speak up in political meetings, they often face annoyance from their male counterparts, who question why women are raising issues at all. As a result, she contends that “women don’t raise issues. They just go [to political meetings] and come back. They call us to come, we go, we sign the register, and then we come back. [Men] think that women should not go to political spaces. They say that women don’t have the right to speak among men.”

Even when women hold political office, the discouragement of women citizens from participating in routine political processes perpetuates the under-representation of their demands. Our data also show that women citizens were 24% less likely to report having met with their elected chairperson in the last three months, and, of those who did meet with the chairperson, women were 12% less likely to say that their demands had been addressed.  

The presence of elected women representatives alone is therefore not sufficient to ensure that women citizens’ needs, both practical and strategic, are addressed. It’s clear that we must not only elect more women but also empower them to advocate for the needs of their constituencies effectively.

Kate: To arrive at the solution you identify – build gender inclusive institutions so that you get gender inclusive policies – what must be done?

Soledad: Addressing this highly complex issue requires a multifaceted approach. We need to reconfigure our gender empowerment initiatives to target women’s agency, their ability to choose and act on their own demands, instead of focusing solely on outcomes. 

Our research suggests that it’s not enough to simply rely on quotas; we need to create supportive frameworks that enable women to thrive as citizens and representatives. That’s where our collaboration with Transform Rural India (TRI) comes into play. 

Over the past two years, our research team has worked closely with TRI to co-create a set of interventions that enable and expand women’s agency and elevate women’s voices. We believe it is critical to support both women elected representatives and women citizens to improve the quality of women’s political representation.

Nivedita: This year, I joined TRI full-time to lead on the design of this program of interventions. Specifically, we’re developing a program that focuses on empowering women leaders who have entered politics through the quota system and increasing opportunities for women leaders to connect with their female constituency. 

Our program aims to enhance the agency and technical skills of women elected representatives and to create networks among women leaders. By fostering mentorship and solidarity among women citizens, we hope to strengthen the capacity of elected women to represent their communities effectively. 

Our goal is to ensure that these leaders can not only take their seats at the table but also influence the discussions and decisions that affect their constituents. We’re excited to pilot this program in latethe fall of 2024, as we have every confidence that it will give rise to meaningful change.

Elevating Women's Voices in Policymaking in India is a 2023 Stage 1 Stanford Impact Labs investment.