Abstract
Gender equality is an idea that is enshrined in the Millennium Development Goals. In order to achieve gender equality, a significant amount of women’s empowerment must occur. Since women’s empowerment is a way out of poverty, many countries have been undertaking tasks to assist women’s ascent in society. One institution that has been established is gender quotas, which allocates seats for women in legislatures. This paper will explore how a country’s context can influence the effectiveness of gender quotas in bringing women into legislatures. From there, I will look at how female politicians affect society at large. By studying regions of the world, I measure societal effects through political engagement at the local level and public opinion of women. Overall, gender quotas do seem to increase public opinion of women, but do not increase local level political engagement. Further research should be done on what policies women in legislatures support.Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (linked here). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are available for wide dissemination at no cost to readers, with proper attribution (acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal), in educational and other non-commercial settings. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
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