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How Can We Close Gender Gaps in Voting?
282 Plays3 years ago
Pakistan has one of the largest gender gaps in voting in the world. In the 2018 election, the number of women who voted was 11 million less than the number of men who voted. What can we do to close this gender gap? How can we reach a state where women are able to exercise their democratic rights as voters on an equal footing with men? But before we talk about that, why is it even important to close this gender gap?
To unpack these questions, I bring in Sarah Khan who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University where she does research on gender and politics. We talk today about some research that we did together, along with Ali Cheema and Shandana Mohmand. This research was published in the American Political Science Review.
In this episode, we take you through how we found what works to increase women’s turnout in Pakistan, why our findings are surprising, and may also be deeply problematic! Link to the research we talked about:
Sarah's recommendations:
- Pakistan General Election 2018 Polling Station Data
- Rachel Brulé (2020) Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Anukriti, S., Herrera-Almanza, C., Pathak, P.K. and Karra, M. (2020), Curse of the Mummy-ji: The Influence of Mothers-in-Law on Women in India. Amer. J. Agr. Econ., 102: 1328-1351.
Recommended
Transcript
Canvassing Campaign Impact on Women
00:00:00
Speaker
First, the bad news, which is that targeting just women with this canvassing campaign was not effective at improving women's turnout. So I think what these results show is that there's a way in which men are
00:00:17
Speaker
central to women's political participation.
Men's Influence on Women's Political Participation
00:00:21
Speaker
Political parties mostly engage with men. Aren't they doing the smart thing by not wasting resources and talking to women because they just don't control the resources? What's important is that this can have real material and distributive implications for whose voices are heard, whose preferences and whose interests are represented.
'Unpacking Us' Podcast Introduction by Asad Lyaka
00:00:44
Speaker
Welcome to Unpacking Us, a podcast where we unpack the deepest questions faced by Pakistani society, politics, and the economy. I'm your host, Asad Lyaka.
Political Instability and Elections in Pakistan
00:01:00
Speaker
Pakistan finds itself in an uncertain political situation once again.
00:01:05
Speaker
The PTILN government that won the 2018 general election has been ousted, and the new PMLN-led government in the center is navigating the tail end of the electoral cycle. There's turmoil at the provincial level in Punjab as well, where both PTILN and PMLN seem to be playing a round of musical chairs. Elections are due to be held in 2023, although there are calls for early elections, and we may well find ourselves in the midst of national election campaigns fairly soon.
00:01:36
Speaker
All in all, there is a seemingly endless series of political drama unfolding in the country.
Debating Free and Fair Democracy
00:01:42
Speaker
If you follow this drama regularly, one view that you might hear is that if only we could eliminate interference in the political process, that if only voters were able to exercise their right to vote and political parties were free to contest elections, then we would automatically have a free and fair democracy.
00:02:03
Speaker
Now, there is some truth in this sentiment in that interference in the political process is of course harmful. But there is also a fundamental error in that in this line of thinking,
00:02:16
Speaker
If there is no interference, the political process is automatically free and fair. That assumes that the biases and the inequities that are inherent in Pakistani society are not reflected in its political outcomes, that different segments of society are able to exercise their democratic rights freely, and that different groups do not enjoy privileges over the others.
00:02:40
Speaker
To examine whether this is true, there's perhaps no segmentation of society that is more central and more critical to focus on than gender.
Addressing Voting Gender Gap
00:02:51
Speaker
So in today's episode, we'll unpack whether men and women have an equal say in Pakistani politics as voters. And if not, what can we do to get closer to equality? To start with, let's take a look at the gender gap in voting.
00:03:09
Speaker
But the gender gap I simply mean the difference between how many men vote versus how many women vote. We have one of the largest gender gaps in voting in the world. In the 2018 election, the number of women who voted was 11 million less than the number of men who voted. That's an astoundingly high number. It's almost the same as the population of the entire city of Lahore.
00:03:36
Speaker
Imagine if everyone in Lahore was eligible to vote, but not a single person turned out to vote. It's hard to see how that wouldn't undermine the legitimacy of the entire national election. So we have a huge gender gap. What can we do to reduce it? How can we reach a state where women are able to exercise their democratic rights as voters on an equal footing with men?
Introducing Sarah Khan and Gender Politics
00:04:02
Speaker
To help unpack this question, I'm going to bring in someone who's well on her way to becoming a global expert on gender and politics. Sarah Khan is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University, where she does research on, among other things, the barriers to women's political participation and representation. Sarah is also my co-author and my friend of nearly two decades, and I'm so glad we get to have this conversation today.
00:04:28
Speaker
We're going to talk about today some research that we did together, along with Ali Shima and Shandana Muhammad. We'll take you through our research journey and how we found what works to increase women's turnout in Pakistan. Why our findings are surprising in that the key to increasing women's turnout may lie not with the women themselves, but with the men in their households.
Men's Role in Increasing Women's Turnout
00:04:53
Speaker
and why our findings, while actionable in some ways, may also be deeply problematic and concerning at the same time, and whether we can resolve some of these conflicts. Sara, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Asad. It's a pleasure to be here.
00:05:12
Speaker
So Sarah, the first question that I want to ask you was the first question that was posed to me when I first presented this research during graduate school to a tough crowd of Harvard economists. And that question was, why should we care about whether women vote at the same rates as men?
Importance of Women's Voting Equality
00:05:31
Speaker
And at the time, I thought the question was very obnoxious and that there was a self-evident truth to it. But over time, I've come to take a more charitable reading of the question, which is, well, when we have so many questions related to the quality of women in this country, employment, violence against women, discrimination in nearly every aspect, why should we care about voting? Why is it important that women vote at the same rates as men?
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah, so I think first of all, it's worth noting that the universal right to vote in democratic elections is a fairly recent phenomenon. So setting aside actual turnout rates, historically that right had been restricted to certain groups, namely property owning men. And so the expansion of suffrage to other classes, other races, other genders follows explicit long and sometimes violent struggles for that right.
00:06:28
Speaker
In the case of Pakistan, by the time we gain independence, universal suffrage is already a global norm for electoral democracies. So the right to vote was not a legal question. But it's worth noting that the making of that global long norm comes on the heels of long and difficult popular struggles. So why does exercising this legal right matter? There's a principle logic of equal participation.
00:06:55
Speaker
But to the extent that we believe in the theoretical promise of electoral democracy, which is that elections are the means by which citizens hold their representatives accountable, the exclusion of certain groups, like women, essentially amounts to their exclusion from this accountability bargain. What's important is that this can have real material and distributive implications for whose voices are heard, whose preferences and whose interests are represented.
00:07:23
Speaker
And that brings us to the question of do women have different interests from men? And this is as much a theoretical debate about whether women are a group or a class in the same way that other social groups are, but it's also an empirical one. And looking at the empirical answer to that question, surveys from around the world over time have shown that women do, in fact, hold different preferences over policies, public goods, and services.
00:07:52
Speaker
One common finding, for instance, that holds true in the Pakistan context from work that I've done is that women put a higher priority on water provision as a key service than do men. And men tend to prioritize infrastructure and roads more than women do. And if we think about it, this corresponds to the deep ways in which men and women's lives look very different.
00:08:19
Speaker
and the way in which they divide household labor differently. When it comes to policy preferences, there's evidence from the United States that following the extension of the right to vote for women, there was also an expansion in the welfare state. Spending on healthcare and schooling went up, divorce laws became liberalized in a way that benefited women.
00:08:46
Speaker
In India, where the gender turnout gap has been steadily reducing, we see that politicians now specifically do address women in campaign promises and target them with election time handouts.
00:09:00
Speaker
In Pakistan, women continue to be invisible from party campaigns. It's something that is apparent if we look at manifestos, if we look at the speeches that parties make, if we look at campaign promises. And women sense this invisibility too. They explicitly talk about it when we ask them about why it is that they're not interested in politics.
00:09:26
Speaker
So it bears out in those interactions that you have with women as citizens. So voting, exercising the equal right to vote may not guarantee that women's voices are heard or represented. But without that, politicians really have very little incentive to pay even lip service to women's concerns or their specific needs.
Study on Men's Impact in Lahore
00:09:49
Speaker
Turning to our research on what works to increase women's turnout in Lahore, we decided to focus the study on the role of men in potentially constraining women's turnout. Can you walk us through why we decided to do that and the theoretical motivation behind this decision?
00:10:09
Speaker
Sure. In the lead up to 2018 elections, there was a lot of focus on instances where communities had placed informal bans through agreements between community leaders and party members to restrict all women in a particular locality for voting. And this is, of course, a violation of the equal right to vote.
00:10:32
Speaker
What these bans represent is an example of when women as individuals don't control their own decision to vote. And we classify such a situation as part of a broader phenomenon called male gatekeeping. This is when men exercise control over women's right to participate and the decision is not a woman's alone. The collective ban now is a very extreme example
00:10:57
Speaker
And it's one where elite actors or community leaders are exercising this gatekeeping power. But we can think about instances of male gatekeeping in all aspects of women's life, from really mundane decisions to consequential life choices. You mentioned earlier that our study was focused in Lahore, which registers a large gender gap in voting.
00:11:21
Speaker
Now Lahore doesn't have these kinds of collective bans. So what's going on? One possibility is that women aren't informed or motivated to vote. Our hunch was that even if women are informed enough and motivated enough about voting, actually going to turn out might require them to have permission from men in their household and for men to actively enable their participation.
00:11:48
Speaker
So if we break down what the actual practice of going to turn out to vote looks like in an urban space, it usually involves some form of transport to get to the polling station.
00:12:02
Speaker
In Lahore, we found that the most common form of such transport to Poles is personal motorbikes. Now, excise data from 2019 shows that 99% of motorbikes are owned by men. And so in this way, men are in a position to exercise control over women's participation by controlling a resource that is necessary for women's participation.
00:12:30
Speaker
Can you give us an example of how mail gatekeeping can affect the ability of them and to go out and vote?
00:12:38
Speaker
Let's take the example of my own household and voting in the 2018 election in Pakistan. My father, mother and I got to the polling station in the car, which is owned by my father. My mother and I don't actually drive. And so on election day, we were in a sense dependent on him for our participation.
00:13:01
Speaker
Regardless of whether he was refusing or coercing us, there was still a way in which he was required to enable our participation. Now, in our case, my mother and I both have outside options. We both earn income, so we could call a taxi. We have social networks of other men and women who we could ask for a ride. So the implications of that gatekeeping power that my father exercised in this situation, perhaps less consequential.
00:13:28
Speaker
But we can think of the situation of most other women who don't participate in the labor force, don't earn their own income. And when living in urban areas are often cut off from family networks and don't have the opportunities to socialize outside the home to expand those networks. We can imagine how the lack of those outside options means that dependence on men and male gatekeeping can be pretty consequential.
00:13:54
Speaker
And for that reason, something that's reflected in our own lived experience as women, we chose to focus on this role that men play in women's participation.
00:14:07
Speaker
I think this is a very powerful example of the central role that male gatekeeping plays in women's lives, including in their role as voters. Sara, we did a fair amount of qualitative research to see how male gatekeeping plays out in the way parties campaign and whether the work of civil society organizations accounts for male gatekeeping, which led us to the kinds of interventions we wanted to test. Can you talk a bit about that?
00:14:33
Speaker
And so what we did was that in 2017, we followed a by-election campaign that was happening in NA 120 in Lahore. For people who remember, this was an election where Khosun Nawaz of PMNN was running against Yasmin Rashid of PTI. So we have two strong female candidates. So this is a situation where we might expect women to be involved and interested in the election.
00:14:59
Speaker
However, when we followed the election campaign, what we noticed first was that in an urban setting, the mode of campaigning that parties rely on most is door-to-door campaigning, which is quite different from rural settings, where we have sort of a community-based approach. So in this door-to-door campaigning, what was happening was, even though the candidates were women, parties were going door-to-door, but they were excluding women both in the content of what they were saying,
00:15:29
Speaker
and in terms of actually speaking to them. Now, the partners that we worked with in this study are two civil society organizations, Aurid Foundation and South Asia Partnership PK, both of which have a long history of working on questions of democratic participation, women's inclusion in politics and democracy.
00:15:52
Speaker
Their past work in elections had followed a model that looked entirely different from that of political parties, which is that they would convene community meetings that included both motivational and informational content for women on why they should vote and how to do it.
00:16:13
Speaker
Now, this of course very explicitly is targeted to women, but something that we were worried about was that this model also potentially could exclude women, in particular those women who don't have the mobility or the required interest to show up to a community meeting in the first place.
00:16:34
Speaker
So when we were thinking about what kind of intervention we want to design and test, it was one that would follow the party model of door-to-door canvassing, but explicitly focus on women's participation, both in terms of directly targeting women and in terms of the message being about the importance of women's participation.
00:17:03
Speaker
Based on this qualitative research, we had a strong hunch that a mobilization campaign that succeeds in increasing women's turnout should be door to door, and should have a strong component that focuses directly on the power of women's vote. We worked with our partners, our foundation, and South Asia Partnership Pakistan to design this campaign.
00:17:24
Speaker
And we wanted to test whether it's enough to deliver this campaign to women, or whether in line with our theory of gatekeeping that Sara just talked about, it's also necessary to deliver this campaign to the men in these households.
Experiment Design for Enhanced Women's Turnout
00:17:38
Speaker
To test this, we used something that some of our listeners might be familiar with, which is something called a randomized experiment. This methodology originally comes from medical trials to test whether medical treatments work.
00:17:52
Speaker
In recent years, it's been adopted by economics and political science and other social sciences. It's a movement that has revolutionized how we do social science. So how does it work? If you want to see how
00:18:06
Speaker
an intervention or a treatment works to change some kind of behavior. You can divide your sample of people randomly into two large groups. If these two random groups are large enough, then statistics will work its magic. And these two groups will be very, very similar to each other. You then deliver your intervention to people in one of these groups. Let's call this group the treatment group and not the other. Let's call that the control group.
00:18:32
Speaker
If the people in the treatment group on average end up behaving differently from the control group, for example, if they end up voting at higher rates, then that means that your intervention worked. In our case, we selected a sample of 2,500 households in seven National Assembly constituencies of Lahore, and we randomly split these 2,500 households into four groups.
00:18:58
Speaker
In one group, our partners delivered the door-to-door mobilization campaign just to the women. In the second, our male canvassers delivered it just to men. And in the third group, we had both male and female canvassers that talked to both the men and the women in each household separately to deliver the campaign. And then finally, we had a fourth group which we did not mobilize at all.
00:19:22
Speaker
We could then compare the turnout of women in these four groups after the election to see which of these interventions worked best to increase women's turnout. We did this experiment right before the 2018 general election in Lahore. Sara, what can you tell us about what we found? Yeah, so what we found was, I think, quite surprising to a lot of people.
00:19:48
Speaker
First, the bad news, which is that targeting just women with this canvassing campaign was not effective at improving women's turnout. So what that means is that in the households where there was no visit and in the households where only women received a visit, a mobilizing visit from women canvassers, there's no difference in women's level of turnout between those two groups.
00:20:15
Speaker
Now, in the households where only men were targeted with this campaign about the importance of women's vote, the turnout of women in those households increased by 5.4 percentage points. In the households where both men and women received separate canvassing visits from male and female mobilizers, respectively, we see an 8 percentage point increase in women's turnout.
00:20:44
Speaker
Now, just to benchmark the size of those effects, the national gender gap in turnout in the 2018 election was 9.1 percentage points. So this 8 percentage point increase that we're able to achieve with targeting both men and women in the household is substantively large.
00:21:07
Speaker
I also want to tell our listeners about how we actually found out whether the women in our sample households voted.
Thumb Impression for Voting Research
00:21:14
Speaker
If you've ever voted in Pakistan, you'll know that an election official marks your thumb with this indelible ink that doesn't go away for a few days. And that thumb impression is a sign that you've already voted in the election.
00:21:28
Speaker
So we sent our amazing team of surveyors with the permission of the Election Commission of course to our sample households and asked the women in these households for permission to see their thumbs to record whether they voted or not. That's how we were able to compare women's turnout in the households in each group to see whether our campaign worked.
00:21:51
Speaker
Sara, you told us that our campaign increased women's turnout the most in the households where we mobilized both men and women. And secondly, in the households where we mobilized just the men. But did not increase turnout in the households where we mobilized just the women. What do these results tell us about men's role as gatekeepers?
00:22:15
Speaker
Right. So I think what these results show is that there's a way in which men are central to women's political participation and that if we leave men out or ignore their role, then we run the risk of not achieving the change that we would like to see.
00:22:39
Speaker
And so when we think about this result of turnout increasing in the households where both men and women were targeted, it's interesting to think for a moment about what else changed besides turnout, right? And so aside from this exercise of going door to door and measuring turnout by looking at thumbing marks, we also conducted follow-up surveys.
00:23:05
Speaker
So what we find in the households where both men and women received the canvassing visit is that both men and women report talking to each other about politics at higher rates. And both men and women report that men took enabling actions like waiting at the polling station for women to be done with voting, like organizing and providing transport for women to go and vote on polling day.
00:23:32
Speaker
And so what this reveals to us about gatekeeping is that there are certain actions that men have to take to enable women's participation. And for a moment, let's also talk about what we don't see, right? So we don't see a change in fundamental attitudes towards women voting.
00:23:53
Speaker
It's important to note that at the outset, both men and women's attitudes towards women's voting were quite favorable. So more than 90% of both men and women thought it was appropriate for women to vote. So what this intervention did is not change
00:24:09
Speaker
men's attitudes towards women's voting, which were already not restrictive to begin with, but rather it seems to have nudged them to take these enabling actions that may be necessary. And so their control comes not from explicitly restricting women's participation, but from controlling the means of that participation through controlling resources like transportation.
00:24:35
Speaker
So if men are the ones who control all the resources and they hold all of the decision-making power, then doesn't that in some ways
00:24:47
Speaker
make
Political Engagement Strategies and Structural Change
00:24:48
Speaker
the decisions of political parties to engage only with men very sensible. You mentioned earlier that in your earlier work, we found that political parties mostly engage with men. Aren't they doing the smart thing by not wasting resources in talking to women because they just don't control the resources. Political parties want the votes of women. Maybe they should just be talking to the men and conserving their resources and not talking to the women. What do you say to that idea?
00:25:17
Speaker
So I think it's important to think about the implications of our findings. So our findings show what works to increase women's turnout under a very unequal status quo where men hold that gatekeeping power. Our intervention was conducted months before the election. It's a 20 minute visit.
00:25:40
Speaker
It's not an intervention that was geared to change the fundamental power structure within households. But the bigger goal of many of us, I think, and one that is shared by our civil society organization partners, is that this fundamentally equals status quo needs to change.
00:26:02
Speaker
that if we want to achieve change in the short term at the margins, then we have to work within the status quo.
00:26:12
Speaker
But at the same time, we need to be taking actions that explicitly challenge that status quo. And that can't be done months before the election in a 20-minute intervention. That is sort of the longer-term processes that, for instance, our partner CSOs are involved in through their work in policy advocacy.
00:26:34
Speaker
And I think what parties are doing in terms of excluding women is not something that we want to sanction with this intervention at all, right? Rather, I think we see this in the way that we write up these results is, in a sense, this is a depressing finding because what it reveals is that there's huge inequality which needs to be challenged through more structural long-term change.
00:27:04
Speaker
So that's a useful reminder to our listeners that change is always incremental and that yes, while in the short run, we should try out a different set of things to improve the situation, whatever the question we may be interested in. But that complements and does not substitute long-term structural change that must take place at the institutional level.
00:27:25
Speaker
One more concern, Sara, that could be raised with respect to our results is that simply the act of voting does not necessarily mean that people are actually exercising their autonomy. It does not necessarily mean that people are voting the way they would actually want to vote of their own free will.
00:27:48
Speaker
One possibility could be that these women are voting at higher rates, but they're just voting for the person or the candidate or the party that the same men in their household tell them to vote for. And is that a good outcome in that case? What do you think of that?
00:28:04
Speaker
So I understand your question to be getting at whether we can interpret higher rates of turnout as truly the sort of women freely exercising their right to vote. And I'm going to say in short, no.
00:28:20
Speaker
Right. Because we still need to think about the process through which women decide who to vote for and to what extent that process is an equal and free and fair one. As you know, to go back to our study specifically, we ask in our survey questions about voting autonomy.
00:28:43
Speaker
And we don't find that autonomy is decreased or negatively affected through this method of targeting men or encouraging men to take enabling actions. So we don't see an example of men then coercing women about who to vote for.
00:29:02
Speaker
But when we ask men and women who they talk to about politics, men overwhelmingly say other men. That includes family, other male family members, co-workers, neighbors, friends. And women overwhelmingly say other men in their households, like spouses and brothers. And so even if men aren't exercising sort of a coercive power, the way that women's preferences and interests are being formed,
00:29:31
Speaker
just looks very different because of the ways in which there is gender inequality in other parts of life. So how would things look different if women were talking to other women about politics? Would they vote differently? Would they come together to demand things of parties that they're not doing right now?
00:29:55
Speaker
So I think the promise that groups participating can lead to better representation of that group's interests really depends on whether people in those groups have the freedom to coalesce around those common interests, to interact with each other and to freely form preferences. And frankly, that is not the situation for most women in Pakistan.
Encouraging Women's Political Engagement
00:30:17
Speaker
So equal levels of participation do not imply equal participation in substance.
00:30:23
Speaker
This is linked to an idea that I think we frequently encountered in our field work, which is that politics is often considered a man's job. When we asked all these questions in our surveys about whether
00:30:38
Speaker
whether women are expected to engage in politics by men or by women themselves. The answers that we got from both men and women tended to overwhelmingly be indicating that it's not socially considered to be a woman's job to discuss politics or engage in politics or do any kind of substantive action in that regard.
00:30:59
Speaker
What do you think would take at a societal level in the long run to make it such that when we run these surveys, we find that women actually do talk to women a lot frequently about politics, that there are these collectives where women are free to engage and do engage without coercion from men?
00:31:18
Speaker
So it's interesting that this idea of politics being a man's job is certainly something that we pick up in our surveys in Pakistan, but it's something that's found in a lot of settings around the world that we might not think of as quite as patriarchal. For instance, there's a study that I like a lot from the United States, which shows that
00:31:44
Speaker
children of school going age, so at that young an age, tend to have pretty gendered ideas about who a political leader looks like. So in this very creative study, children are asked to draw political leaders. And at a very young age, girls and boys start to overwhelmingly draw men. And so these ideas are formed very early in life.
00:32:11
Speaker
And when we're intervening months before the election, we're coming in quite late. Right. And so I think for a longer term change, breaking those gender roles is something that happens over generations. It takes efforts at multiple levels, including in curriculum. And there's also work from political science showing a relationship between women's labor force participation
00:32:40
Speaker
and their political preferences and so when women participate in the labour force their preferences and interests change and there's a lot of debate about what exactly about working it is that produces that change but one pathway is through the networks that women gain with other women to start discussing not even necessarily politics but just kind of the
00:33:06
Speaker
ways in which their lives might be unequal and how they can demand greater accountability from political actors. Another way is that their earning income and having economic independence can lead to a change in the content of their preferences. Pakistan has a really low female labor force participation rate, and that's not something we should think of ever as unconnected from this gender gap in political participation.
00:33:36
Speaker
A question that we often get asked as researchers is that you spend a lot of time and resources in doing these research projects. How much of that is actually translated to something on the ground? So
Civil Society's Reception of Research
00:33:49
Speaker
I know that you have recently been to Pakistan and you've been engaging with the Election Commission of Pakistan and the Earth Foundation and other organizations. How has the reception to these results been?
00:34:01
Speaker
Absolutely. So I think first of all, it's just really important to acknowledge the work of a number of civil society organizations for simply highlighting the issue of the gender gap. And in terms of our specific findings, so I think there's been a lot of interest in this descriptive finding about women's turnout being especially low in metropolitan cities. Because I think there is this assumption about cities somehow being
00:34:29
Speaker
more gender progressive. And they might be on certain dimensions, but not on this one. And so just highlighting that metropolitan cities are an important site for mobilizing work, and they're contributing in a large way to the gender gap. So the gender gap in Lahore is larger than the gender gap in the rest of Punjab.
00:34:51
Speaker
And so if we're thinking about where to target given limited resources, the first thought is often not these metropolitan cities, but we're putting it on the table that it should be, perhaps. The second thing is, I think, for the Election Commission, for instance, you know, highlighting the
00:35:14
Speaker
The disconnect between women's registration, which is also registration to vote in terms of having a CNIC, which is an issue they've been extremely focused on, done a lot of great work on, and actually turning out to vote.
00:35:31
Speaker
and that those things might often not be correlated. So for instance, this gap that we find in turnout being the largest in metropolitan cities, we don't find that the gap in CNICs or registration is also the largest in metropolitan cities in terms of our civil society partners. So it's very interesting because in the past, their voter mobilization work has been
00:35:56
Speaker
exclusively targeted to women. But that's not the case for their work on women's candidacy. But that learning had not in the same way been applied to the act of voting. So I think there is obviously a recognition and action around the fact that men are central to women's political participation. But what we hope these findings show is that even for something
00:36:24
Speaker
where men are not acting to restrict women's role, they can still act as gatekeepers by not actively enabling women's participation. And so the status quo is so unequal that for the simple act of going out of the house to vote, it's not standing for office, it's not about, you know,
00:36:45
Speaker
having working outside the home, it is really just we're talking about an action taken on one day. Even that requires involving Ben. And so I think sort of really focusing on what do the mechanics of the act of voting look like and how men have a role to play on the election day itself. I think
Men's Involvement in Women's Voting Process
00:37:06
Speaker
really breaking down that action into its components and demonstrating men's role.
00:37:12
Speaker
is hopefully a contribution that we hope that we've made to the organization's strategy. So my takeaway from your responses is that, or at least the feeling that I get while listening to your response, is largely the feeling that I think all of us had through most of running this project, which is, you know, there were many glimmers of hope and optimism in an otherwise bleak scenario.
Exploring Gender Gaps and Gatekeeping
00:37:36
Speaker
At the end, one thing that I ask my guests to do is to make some recommendations to our listeners about what they can do to learn more about the topic that we talked about or similar topics. So what are some suggestions that we have for our listeners to learn more about the gender gap in women's turnout or about gatekeeping in general?
00:38:02
Speaker
Absolutely. So I think for those listeners who are oriented towards data and statistics, the fact that we have gender disaggregated data for the 2018 election at the polling station level is a market shift. And it's a shift that came about because in part of the advocacy of organizations to
00:38:27
Speaker
have this data publicly available. So I encourage people to go to the website, download that data, look for patterns, because there's still a lot that we don't understand or know about the patterns of the gender gap. And for those who are not going to download the data themselves and look at it, I would say that anytime there's a statistic about participation,
00:38:53
Speaker
that you encounter in a media story or in a conversation to ask the follow-up question about what the gender breakdown of that statistic is, because often asking that question reveals gaps that can be kind of a motivation for further inquiry or action. Another
00:39:21
Speaker
place that I want to point people to is that we've focused a lot on men's role as gatekeepers. But as somebody who studies gender, I think it's important to step away from
00:39:40
Speaker
assumptions about men and women. And so I would point to literature that looks at women in gatekeeping roles. And this can be both positive and negative gatekeeping roles. So a book that I've been reading
00:39:57
Speaker
recently is by Rachel Brule called Women Power and Property in India. And this is about how women access their right to inheritance. And she looks at the role that elected officials at the local level play as gatekeepers of these rights.
00:40:17
Speaker
And what she shows is that when there is a quota or reservation for women in those in those elected positions and you have essentially female gatekeepers.
00:40:30
Speaker
They help to enable women's access to this right. And that is a consequential outcome. And it's also one that is then threatening to men in households and in communities. There's also a economics paper by
00:40:50
Speaker
by Anukriti and co-authors, which has a great title called The Curse of the Mamiji, the Influence of Mothers-in-Law on Women in India. And this looks at how mothers-in-law in households play a restrictive role for young married women's autonomy, especially in terms of family planning and the use of contraception.
00:41:16
Speaker
And so here's an example of, again, women acting as gatekeepers and explicitly restricting other women's access. So this sort of phenomenon of gatekeeping, I think, is a very broad one. We can think about it not just in terms of political participation, but in terms of a number of mundane and consequential decisions that women make in their lives and that gatekeepers aren't necessarily men.
00:41:43
Speaker
Sara, thank you for being here and I look forward to having you on the podcast again.
Conclusion and Recommendations
00:41:49
Speaker
Thank you so much, Asif. You can find some links to what we talked about in this episode and to the recommendations made by our guest today in the show notes of this episode or on unpackingus.com.
00:42:12
Speaker
Don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this episode. Also, I'd love to hear what you like and don't like about the show. And if you have any ideas for future episodes, you can email me at asadatunpackingus.com. I can't promise to respond to every email, but I do promise to read and think about every email. Thank you for listening.