When does Women's Political Power Matter? Women's Representation and Legal Gender Equality of Economic Opportunity across Contexts

This article explores how women's descriptive representation affects legal gender equality of economic opportunity. Building on existing studies on women's descriptive and substantive representation, we argue that as the proportion of female legislators and ministers increases, legal gender equality of economic opportunity improves. Additionally, a country's institutional context significantly shapes the influence of women in different positions of power on legal gender equality. We thus expect that the higher the legislature's law-making power, the greater the effect of female legislators on legal gender equality; under the same condition, its relative influence compared to female cabinet ministers is also greater. Similarly, we hypothesize that the higher the level of democracy, the more effective female legislators compared to female ministers. To test these arguments, we draw on the WBL database that provides cross-national information on legal discrimination against women in economic opportunities. Looking at 156 countries from 1970 to 2014, we find that the percentages of both female legislators and female ministers are positively associated with legal gender equality of economic opportunity. We also find that when the legislature's law-making power or the level of democracy are high, the effect of female legislators outweighs that of female cabinet members. These findings are robust to attempts to rule out competing explanations, alternative estimation methods, alternative temporal units of analysis, and alternative samples. Last, our supplementary analyses reveal that gender quotas are positively associated with legal gender equality and that gender quotas positively interact with the levels of democracy or legislative power in improving legal gender equality of economic opportunity.