North elects more women MLAs
Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan have the highest proportion
When the results to the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly elections came out two weeks ago, the northern State had produced twice the proportion of women legislators as its western counterpart.
This isn’t an exception; States with poor records on gender equality are consistently producing more female MLAs.
Using Election Commission of India data, The Hindu found that as of today, Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan have the highest proportion of women MLAs in the country (14 per cent) while Nagaland, Mizoram and Karnakata bring up the bottom (2 per cent and below). Using 50 years of State elections data until 2012, economists Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi of the Indian School of Business found that women were far more likely to contest elections from constituencies with a sex ratio skewed against women, most of which were in the northern States. While fewer women contested elections in the southern and western States, however, they were more likely to win, they found.
Professors Kapoor and Ravi hypothesise that the greater propensity of women to contest from the northern States is a result of the skewed sex ratio: “[I]n places where the gender ratio is in favour of women, they do not have to incur the high cost of contesting an election to achieve their preferred policy outcomes. They achieve this through the simple act of voting…[I]n constituencies, where the gender ratio is unfavourable to women, woman candidates incur the costly strategy of contesting elections, not always with the objective of winning but to prevent those candidates whose policy preferences are farthest from their interest,” they wrote.
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