Speaking at Chatham House on the issue of women’s equality, Mrs. Blair featured J-PAL study “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India” (Esther Duflo and Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, September 2004).

"For example, in recent years India has enacted laws to promote the participation of women in local government, which now reserve a third of all the full-time positions of head of village council and a third of places on many councils for women. A fascinating study by the Jamel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that in the reserved councils with women leaders, considerably more investment was made in priorities such as improving water supplies.

Depressingly, however, the research showed that even where women could clearly be seen to be outperforming their male counterparts, the perception of both men and women in the community is that they have done a worse job. The only good news was that the study found that, over time, the performance of women leaders did help tackle this prejudice.

But the overall conclusion reached by the study was that there remains a significant cultural barrier to recognizing women as competent policy makers, which explains why so few women are elected or reelected to unreserved seats at the local level."

October 31, BBC Today/Chatham House Lecture: Women's Human Rights in the 21st Century. Complete transcript available at:
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/10710_311007booth.pdf