How gender quotas are challenging political inequality in South Korea
Source: LSE
How do you boost women’s representation in government, ask Jay Euijung Lee and Martina Zanella? Simple gender quotas risk being gamed, for instance by parties fielding women in unwinnable constituencies. The key, they suggest, involves distinguishing between two different kinds of discrimination faced by women in political careers.
In the pursuit of women’s representation in government, gender quotas of various kinds have been adopted by over 130 countries. However, simply implementing quotas is not enough to guarantee meaningful change. Political parties and voters may resist quotas, especially when biases against women’s competence in politics are deeply entrenched. Our recent study shows that even in such settings, however, quotas can gradually reduce these biases if they are designed appropriately.
Our case study is municipal council elections in South Korea. Since their inception in the 1990s, these councils have been overwhelmingly male-dominated, with women making up a mere 2% of elected officials. On top of this, 60% of Korean respondents in the World Values Survey of 2005 agreed that men make better political leaders than women. To combat this gender imbalance, a quota was introduced in 2006 along with wider reforms to the electoral rules for these elections…
Read here the full article published by LSE Inequalities on 27 November 2024.
Image by LSE Inequalities
How do you boost women’s representation in government, ask Jay Euijung Lee and Martina Zanella? Simple gender quotas risk being gamed, for instance by parties fielding women in unwinnable constituencies. The key, they suggest, involves distinguishing between two different kinds of discrimination faced by women in political careers.
In the pursuit of women’s representation in government, gender quotas of various kinds have been adopted by over 130 countries. However, simply implementing quotas is not enough to guarantee meaningful change. Political parties and voters may resist quotas, especially when biases against women’s competence in politics are deeply entrenched. Our recent study shows that even in such settings, however, quotas can gradually reduce these biases if they are designed appropriately.
Our case study is municipal council elections in South Korea. Since their inception in the 1990s, these councils have been overwhelmingly male-dominated, with women making up a mere 2% of elected officials. On top of this, 60% of Korean respondents in the World Values Survey of 2005 agreed that men make better political leaders than women. To combat this gender imbalance, a quota was introduced in 2006 along with wider reforms to the electoral rules for these elections…
Read here the full article published by LSE Inequalities on 27 November 2024.
Image by LSE Inequalities
