A powerful evidence base identifies human trafficking as a symptom of gender inequality and, as such, a women’s interest issue. The women and politics literature has long posited and evaluated whether there is a link between female descriptive representation and attention to women’s issues. Yet, not a single study to date evaluates whether the greater inclusion of women in positions of political power influences anti-trafficking legislation across the globe. This manuscript makes that step. We evaluate whether increases in women in leading political decision-making positions improves their countries’ anti-trafficking enforcement. Using ordinal regression analysis, we test whether higher levels of women in national legislatures lead to higher levels of enforcement with data on 162 countries measured in the late 2000s. We situate our findings in both the women’s substantive representation and good governance literatures. In addition to gender inequality, corruption is a powerful driver of failures in anti-trafficking enforcement. And, corruption is linked to many additional enforcement failures that have implications for gender inequality. This perspective links the representation of more specific female interests to broader good governance outcomes. Under this perspective, we use the focus on anti-trafficking enforcement to explore the implications of our findings for this larger nexus of women’s interests, women’s descriptive representation, and good governance.
