Gender bias and women political performance

We model voters' gender bias as a prejudice on women's competence coming from a distorted prior. We analyse the effect of this bias in a two-period two-party election in which voters care about both ideology and competence. We find that female politicians are less likely to win office but, when elected have higher competence on average. As a consequence, they choose to seek re-election more often. We also show that if parties endogenously select candidates, the effect of gender bias is stronger, in that we observe fewer female candidates and elected politicians, and of higher competence. This holds even when parties are not biased.