Esther Duflo talks about work she did in India where there is a policy of affirmative action for women in politics at the local level, meaning that in every election, a number of randomly chosen villages must elect a female leader. Duflo and her team could compare those villages to others who had not ever had a woman elected.
Not only were their policy efforts different than their male counterparts, they found that this exposure to a woman in power resulted in higher graduation rates for girls, reduced the parents’ aspiration gap between boys and girls, and increased teenagers’ own aspirations for their lives and careers.
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