Income inequality and women’s descriptive representation

Abstract

While the average percentage of women in national legislatures increased by nearly 20 percentage points from less than 5 percent in the early 1960s to 22 percent in 2014, it will still take 70–80 years for women to achieve parity in political representation, if women’s presence in elected office continues to grow at the current rate. In this article, I focus on one factor, income inequality, which potentially slows down women’s advancements in politics. I hypothesize that high-income inequalities, because they are not gender neutral, disproportionally disadvantage women’s political careers. I test this hypothesis with the help of a large-scale database, which includes information on women’s representation, income inequalities, and eight theoretically informed control variables for more than 140 countries from 1960 to 2014. Through latent growth models and Tobit models, I find that income inequalities slow down the growth rate in women’s representation.