Gender Quotas in Mexico Not Reducing Quality of Female Political Candidates Reidel - Phys.org
go to original February 18, 2016

Caroline Beer, associate professor of political science, has extended her research on democratization by looking into the effects of gender quotas in politics. (Andy Duback)

A new study examining the impact of a series of gender quotas passed by Mexico to ensure equal representation in government shows no drop in the qualifications of women in office after two election cycles, and also refutes the widely held perception that women rely on personal connections more than men to get elected.

Findings of the study, published online in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities, are in direct opposition to critics who argued that the new reforms would result in a wave of unqualified women in key political positions, and illustrates the importance of giving gender-based reforms time to be fully implemented and put into practice before drawing conclusions.

Based on detailed biographical data of more than 500 Mexican senators since 1964 when women first took office, the study shows that women were actually more qualified than men prior to the initial passage of gender quotas in the 1990s in all major indicators including educational attainment and political experience. Data from the initial years following the implementation of the quotas (1994-2006), however, showed a steep drop in the educational attainment levels of women in office and to a lesser degree political experience, providing fodder for anti-quota critics.

It wasn't until Caroline Beer, lead author of the study and associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont, decided to also look at the qualifications of women in the senate after two election cycles that it became clear women had caught back up in terms of qualifications and were on par with those of men.

"My thought was that if women had to have more experience and be better qualified candidates to be successful that was an indicator that they were being discriminated against, and in fact that was the case prior to the quotas," says Beer, an expert in comparative and Latin American politics and democratization. "The data from the early years after implementation showed that people who thought quotas would produce unqualified candidates were right, especially when it came to women with bachelor's degrees. The most interesting finding was this blip before women caught back up again and were just as qualified as their male counterparts."

Read the rest at Phys.org

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