WINNERS:
Emily Rains: The Origins and Consequences of Women’s Leadership in Urban Slums: Developing Theory and Evidence From India
Comparative urban research has increasingly focused on urban slums and the influential brokers (informal leaders) that emerge in these spaces to mediate interactions between their communities and the state. To date, however, there is almost no empirical evidence on the women who take on these and other leadership roles in informal settlements. Who are the women who emerge as brokers in these spaces, what barriers do they face to leadership, what problems do they help to solve, and how this type of informal descriptive representation affect other women in their neighborhoods? This project focuses on providing novel evidence on women brokers in Indian slums. I draw on a large original quantitative dataset previously collected with colleagues in over 200 slums and more than 100 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with slum residents and leaders from Jaipur, Patna, and Bangalore to generate preliminary evidence on a.) who women turn to for help with various types of problems, b.) the characteristics of the men and women who are named by their community members as local leaders, c.) whether men and women leaders solve different types of problems, and d.) who they solve them for. Going forward, I plan to supplement these data with additional interviews with women leaders. Ultimately, the project will produce theory and evidence on gender gaps in preferences for, barriers to, and the consequences of informal representation in these spaces.
Angie Torres-Beltran: The Historical Origins of the Gendered State and its Contemporary Implications: Theory and Evidence from Mexico
States are fundamentally gendered. The gendered dynamics of state power focus on the legal strategies used by states to promote gender equality, however, less is known regarding how historical developments and contemporary practices influence the patterns of gendered governance. Thus, I ask: how do the historical origins of states impact gender equality, and under what conditions do states sustain gendered norms? This paper examines how states, via political parties and bureaucracies, maintain and reproduce gendered institutions for the purposes of maintaining power. To assess these claims, I conduct a historical case analysis of the development of the Mexican state to demonstrate that the gendered construction of the Mexican state over time obstructs present-day progress towards gender equality. I complement this analysis with in-depth interviews with politicians, national-, state-, and municipal-level bureaucrats to understand the contemporary, gendered practices of the state. In this study, I demonstrate that (1) the historical development of the state structure is gendered and thus promotes uneven governance practices for women and (2) political parties play a critical role in maintaining gendered governance practices through competition and bureaucracies. By doing so, states are able to “perform” successful gendered governance and political parties are able to preserve their rule but place state responsibilities on women citizens which further (1) solidifies women’s position in relation to the state and (2) entrenches the gendered division of labor in fulfilling the state’s obligations and duties to its citizens, sustaining gendered state norms. This study has implications for the performance of bureaucracies and gendered resistance to failures thereof.
Myles Williamson: A Global Analysis of Transgender Rights: Introducing the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP)
To what extent do countries protect the rights of transgender people? How does this differ from legal protections countries offer sexual orientation minorities? What conditions are beneficial for advancing trans rights? Limitations in data availability and accessibility make answering these types of trans-specific questions difficult. To address this shortcoming, this project introduces a new dataset. The Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP) provides insight into the legal situations transgender people faced in 173 countries from 2000 to 2021. The dataset currently includes 14 indicators that capture the presence or absence of laws related to criminalization, legal gender recognition, and anti-discrimination protections. Using this data, the project also discusses the global status of transgender rights throughout the period and compares these trends to sexual orientation rights. Finally, I conclude with a preliminary analysis that suggests democracy, economic development, and low levels of religiosity are beneficial for expanding trans rights protections.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Emily Myers: Gendered Governance: How Women in Insurgent Government Shape Rebel Rule
Women are central to the governance of many armed groups, yet there is limited scholarship probing how women insurgent governors shape rebel rule. I theorize that women rebel governors increase rebel delivery of care services during civil war because pursuing goals that conform to gendered expectations aids the consolidation of their social standing and political power. I use cross-national, quantitative analysis to show that women’s leadership in armed groups is strongly correlated with rebel-provided care services. Drawing on in-depth interviews and other qualitative evidence about the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) rebellion, I find support for my proposed mechanisms.
Sara Morell: Supporting Women: How Women’s Candidate Training Organizations Shape Women's Ambition and Representation
My dissertation and eventual book project takes a deeply mixed-methods approach to the study of Women’s Candidate Training Organizations (WCTOs) and their role within the candidate recruitment ecosystem. I argue that WCTOs are more successful than other forms of recruitment and training organizations at increasing individual-level ambition, and ultimately state-level representation, because they are more likely to center women’s experiences and substantively address gender-specific barriers to running. In turn, women are more likely to perceive these organizations as interested in and able to help people like them. However, women’s other identities and psychological attachment to gender, shape this effect of recruitment from a women’s organization. Through 57 interviews with both women’s and all-gender candidate training organizations, I demonstrate that women’s organizations are more likely to center gender in their candidate trainings, engage in active mobilization around making local change, and to directly address women’s material and psychological barriers to running. However, women’s organizations are driven by the gendered experiences of their leadership and who is most likely to seek them out, shaping their ability to address racial and partisan diversity in women’s barriers to running. Overall, these interviews served as a the basis for a series of three survey experiments and a statistical analysis to understand the effect that women’s organizations have both on women’s ambition and representation overall, and across race and partisanship. With the help of the EGEN prize, I will be able to run the final experiment for my book project, testing the effect of partisan signals from a WCTO on Democratic and Republican women’s perceptions of the organization. This experiment is essential for explaining the challenges WCTOs mentioned in my interviews in appealing to Republicans, as well as the considerably smaller number of Republican women running for office.
Maya Novak-Herzog: Axes of Consent: Public Perception in the Legacy of Title IX
The definition of consent is critical to distinguish sex from assault; misunderstandings of consent are therefore at the heart of the sexual assault crisis on college campuses. Yet there has been almost no research on how undergraduates, faculty, and Title IX officers define consent and if their conceptions cohere with Title IX and legal definitions of the term. Lack of coherence between these definitions might explain an inadequacy in efforts to combat assault and rape. To better understand how these stakeholders define consent, my research creates a novel analytical framework— grounded in feminist theory—that centers on four axes (power, affirmation, capability, constitution) and considers whether their presence or absence affects how individuals define consent. I also investigate how the gender, race, partisanship, and sexuality of those involved in a sexual scenario impact their views. To test the veracity of my novel framework, I use survey data, interviews, and a conjoint experiment drawn from a representative national survey of undergraduates, faculty, and Title IX officers. Ultimately, I hypothesize that relevant populations at universities lack a uniform definition of consent. Understanding consent is thus the first step in preventing sexual violence on college campuses and beyond.
Ari Ray: When Identity Trumps Class: Women, Workers and Statistical Representation in Legislative Politics
Are there trade-offs in the representation of women and workers? Probing this question, I examine Italian archival data to examine how an exogenous increase in the number of women in elected office affects legislature class composition. For this, I leverage a natural experiment, in which some municipalities temporarily introduced gender quotas on party lists. Findings show that having a sole election with a gender quota has positive effects on the descriptive representation of women from the lower-middle and working classes. Upper-middle class women were unaffected by the quota, as were working-class men. Instead, middle class men are the primary losers of quota adoption. Results thus highlight that—in contexts characterized by low party gatekeeping—gender parity rules can work to bolster the prevalence of the intersectional groups that are the most under-represented in politics. When this occurs, representational improvements come mainly at the cost of male groups that are traditionally over-represented.
Anirvan Chowdhury: Religiously Conservative Parties and Women's Political Mobilization: Gender Norms and Political Participation in India
Political participation is of fundamental importance in democratic settings, but most democracies suffer from low rates of women’s participation. I argue that women’s political involvement is a function of how political parties navigate gender norms in society and within the household. Using the case of India, which recently witnessed a large increase in the rate of women’s participation in support of a right-wing Hindu nationalist party, I argue that in traditional societies, where women face normative barriers to taking part in politics, religiously conservative parties may be able to reduce the costs of women’s political participation. In doing so, I highlight the role of seva, a norm of service, that publicly reinforces women’s private care-giving roles and de-emphasizes the potentially transgressive nature of their political engagement. This circumvents a perceived challenge to patriarchal notions of acceptable women’s behavior in private and public spheres making it easier for women to enter political spaces when supporting religiously conservative parties.
Camila Páez-Bernal: When Women Say “No More”: Exploring the Green and Purple Tides in Latin America
Since the late 1990s, gender-related policies have been implemented in most countries of the region, with a domino effect starting in Mexico. Nonetheless, protests and demonstrations have not diminished; on the contrary, they have intensified and become more confrontational toward governments and power-holders. Today, the so-called ‘Purple’ and ‘Green’ tides have generated massive women’s mobilization to demand human rights, sexual and reproductive rights, and political participation. My research addresses the question: why are women’s mobilizations increasing and becoming more confrontational toward the power-holders in Latin America despite an increase in progressive gender-based legislation and policies? The project utilizes a multi-method approach, including statistical analysis of gender-based policies and contentious repertoires and in-depth research on two case studies in Mexico and Colombia, focusing critically on feminicide and gender-based violence policies and laws. The research seeks to advance the understanding of women's movements in Latin America and worldwide and contribute to the knowledge of identity-based social movements and factors contributing to the rise or fall of mobilization.
The EGEN 2023 Prize Award was generously supported by NSF grant #2215500.
Emily Rains: The Origins and Consequences of Women’s Leadership in Urban Slums: Developing Theory and Evidence From India
Comparative urban research has increasingly focused on urban slums and the influential brokers (informal leaders) that emerge in these spaces to mediate interactions between their communities and the state. To date, however, there is almost no empirical evidence on the women who take on these and other leadership roles in informal settlements. Who are the women who emerge as brokers in these spaces, what barriers do they face to leadership, what problems do they help to solve, and how this type of informal descriptive representation affect other women in their neighborhoods? This project focuses on providing novel evidence on women brokers in Indian slums. I draw on a large original quantitative dataset previously collected with colleagues in over 200 slums and more than 100 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with slum residents and leaders from Jaipur, Patna, and Bangalore to generate preliminary evidence on a.) who women turn to for help with various types of problems, b.) the characteristics of the men and women who are named by their community members as local leaders, c.) whether men and women leaders solve different types of problems, and d.) who they solve them for. Going forward, I plan to supplement these data with additional interviews with women leaders. Ultimately, the project will produce theory and evidence on gender gaps in preferences for, barriers to, and the consequences of informal representation in these spaces.
Angie Torres-Beltran: The Historical Origins of the Gendered State and its Contemporary Implications: Theory and Evidence from Mexico
States are fundamentally gendered. The gendered dynamics of state power focus on the legal strategies used by states to promote gender equality, however, less is known regarding how historical developments and contemporary practices influence the patterns of gendered governance. Thus, I ask: how do the historical origins of states impact gender equality, and under what conditions do states sustain gendered norms? This paper examines how states, via political parties and bureaucracies, maintain and reproduce gendered institutions for the purposes of maintaining power. To assess these claims, I conduct a historical case analysis of the development of the Mexican state to demonstrate that the gendered construction of the Mexican state over time obstructs present-day progress towards gender equality. I complement this analysis with in-depth interviews with politicians, national-, state-, and municipal-level bureaucrats to understand the contemporary, gendered practices of the state. In this study, I demonstrate that (1) the historical development of the state structure is gendered and thus promotes uneven governance practices for women and (2) political parties play a critical role in maintaining gendered governance practices through competition and bureaucracies. By doing so, states are able to “perform” successful gendered governance and political parties are able to preserve their rule but place state responsibilities on women citizens which further (1) solidifies women’s position in relation to the state and (2) entrenches the gendered division of labor in fulfilling the state’s obligations and duties to its citizens, sustaining gendered state norms. This study has implications for the performance of bureaucracies and gendered resistance to failures thereof.
Myles Williamson: A Global Analysis of Transgender Rights: Introducing the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP)
To what extent do countries protect the rights of transgender people? How does this differ from legal protections countries offer sexual orientation minorities? What conditions are beneficial for advancing trans rights? Limitations in data availability and accessibility make answering these types of trans-specific questions difficult. To address this shortcoming, this project introduces a new dataset. The Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP) provides insight into the legal situations transgender people faced in 173 countries from 2000 to 2021. The dataset currently includes 14 indicators that capture the presence or absence of laws related to criminalization, legal gender recognition, and anti-discrimination protections. Using this data, the project also discusses the global status of transgender rights throughout the period and compares these trends to sexual orientation rights. Finally, I conclude with a preliminary analysis that suggests democracy, economic development, and low levels of religiosity are beneficial for expanding trans rights protections.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Emily Myers: Gendered Governance: How Women in Insurgent Government Shape Rebel Rule
Women are central to the governance of many armed groups, yet there is limited scholarship probing how women insurgent governors shape rebel rule. I theorize that women rebel governors increase rebel delivery of care services during civil war because pursuing goals that conform to gendered expectations aids the consolidation of their social standing and political power. I use cross-national, quantitative analysis to show that women’s leadership in armed groups is strongly correlated with rebel-provided care services. Drawing on in-depth interviews and other qualitative evidence about the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) rebellion, I find support for my proposed mechanisms.
Sara Morell: Supporting Women: How Women’s Candidate Training Organizations Shape Women's Ambition and Representation
My dissertation and eventual book project takes a deeply mixed-methods approach to the study of Women’s Candidate Training Organizations (WCTOs) and their role within the candidate recruitment ecosystem. I argue that WCTOs are more successful than other forms of recruitment and training organizations at increasing individual-level ambition, and ultimately state-level representation, because they are more likely to center women’s experiences and substantively address gender-specific barriers to running. In turn, women are more likely to perceive these organizations as interested in and able to help people like them. However, women’s other identities and psychological attachment to gender, shape this effect of recruitment from a women’s organization. Through 57 interviews with both women’s and all-gender candidate training organizations, I demonstrate that women’s organizations are more likely to center gender in their candidate trainings, engage in active mobilization around making local change, and to directly address women’s material and psychological barriers to running. However, women’s organizations are driven by the gendered experiences of their leadership and who is most likely to seek them out, shaping their ability to address racial and partisan diversity in women’s barriers to running. Overall, these interviews served as a the basis for a series of three survey experiments and a statistical analysis to understand the effect that women’s organizations have both on women’s ambition and representation overall, and across race and partisanship. With the help of the EGEN prize, I will be able to run the final experiment for my book project, testing the effect of partisan signals from a WCTO on Democratic and Republican women’s perceptions of the organization. This experiment is essential for explaining the challenges WCTOs mentioned in my interviews in appealing to Republicans, as well as the considerably smaller number of Republican women running for office.
Maya Novak-Herzog: Axes of Consent: Public Perception in the Legacy of Title IX
The definition of consent is critical to distinguish sex from assault; misunderstandings of consent are therefore at the heart of the sexual assault crisis on college campuses. Yet there has been almost no research on how undergraduates, faculty, and Title IX officers define consent and if their conceptions cohere with Title IX and legal definitions of the term. Lack of coherence between these definitions might explain an inadequacy in efforts to combat assault and rape. To better understand how these stakeholders define consent, my research creates a novel analytical framework— grounded in feminist theory—that centers on four axes (power, affirmation, capability, constitution) and considers whether their presence or absence affects how individuals define consent. I also investigate how the gender, race, partisanship, and sexuality of those involved in a sexual scenario impact their views. To test the veracity of my novel framework, I use survey data, interviews, and a conjoint experiment drawn from a representative national survey of undergraduates, faculty, and Title IX officers. Ultimately, I hypothesize that relevant populations at universities lack a uniform definition of consent. Understanding consent is thus the first step in preventing sexual violence on college campuses and beyond.
Ari Ray: When Identity Trumps Class: Women, Workers and Statistical Representation in Legislative Politics
Are there trade-offs in the representation of women and workers? Probing this question, I examine Italian archival data to examine how an exogenous increase in the number of women in elected office affects legislature class composition. For this, I leverage a natural experiment, in which some municipalities temporarily introduced gender quotas on party lists. Findings show that having a sole election with a gender quota has positive effects on the descriptive representation of women from the lower-middle and working classes. Upper-middle class women were unaffected by the quota, as were working-class men. Instead, middle class men are the primary losers of quota adoption. Results thus highlight that—in contexts characterized by low party gatekeeping—gender parity rules can work to bolster the prevalence of the intersectional groups that are the most under-represented in politics. When this occurs, representational improvements come mainly at the cost of male groups that are traditionally over-represented.
Anirvan Chowdhury: Religiously Conservative Parties and Women's Political Mobilization: Gender Norms and Political Participation in India
Political participation is of fundamental importance in democratic settings, but most democracies suffer from low rates of women’s participation. I argue that women’s political involvement is a function of how political parties navigate gender norms in society and within the household. Using the case of India, which recently witnessed a large increase in the rate of women’s participation in support of a right-wing Hindu nationalist party, I argue that in traditional societies, where women face normative barriers to taking part in politics, religiously conservative parties may be able to reduce the costs of women’s political participation. In doing so, I highlight the role of seva, a norm of service, that publicly reinforces women’s private care-giving roles and de-emphasizes the potentially transgressive nature of their political engagement. This circumvents a perceived challenge to patriarchal notions of acceptable women’s behavior in private and public spheres making it easier for women to enter political spaces when supporting religiously conservative parties.
Camila Páez-Bernal: When Women Say “No More”: Exploring the Green and Purple Tides in Latin America
Since the late 1990s, gender-related policies have been implemented in most countries of the region, with a domino effect starting in Mexico. Nonetheless, protests and demonstrations have not diminished; on the contrary, they have intensified and become more confrontational toward governments and power-holders. Today, the so-called ‘Purple’ and ‘Green’ tides have generated massive women’s mobilization to demand human rights, sexual and reproductive rights, and political participation. My research addresses the question: why are women’s mobilizations increasing and becoming more confrontational toward the power-holders in Latin America despite an increase in progressive gender-based legislation and policies? The project utilizes a multi-method approach, including statistical analysis of gender-based policies and contentious repertoires and in-depth research on two case studies in Mexico and Colombia, focusing critically on feminicide and gender-based violence policies and laws. The research seeks to advance the understanding of women's movements in Latin America and worldwide and contribute to the knowledge of identity-based social movements and factors contributing to the rise or fall of mobilization.
The EGEN 2023 Prize Award was generously supported by NSF grant #2215500.