Female Ministers, Governance and Reforms

In this paper, we test whether the gender composition of government affects the quality of governance and reform efforts, thus connecting the literature that documents the effects of gender on decision making to the literature on the determinants of reforms. We find that countries with a higher share of female ministers and a higher share of female MPs tend to score somewhat better in terms of regulatory quality and government effectiveness, and in terms of reforms in these areas, but also that tackling possible endogeneity shows most of these effects to be insignificant. Our results thus do not provide support for the claim that ‘conducting reforms is not women’s business’, they rather suggest that reform is as much women’s business as it is men’s business.