There is increasing interest in whether improving the participation of women in government will lead to more gender equality. We test this with data collected from South India, using a natural experiment that randomly reserves one-third of all presidencies in democratically elected village...

State policies can enormously influence gender equity. They can mitigate cultural constraints on women's autonomy (as in China and India) or slow the pace of change in gender equity (as in the Republic of Korea). Policies to provide opportunities for women's empowerment should be accompanied by...

The authors compare changes in gender roles and women's empowerment in China, India, and the Republic of Korea. Around 1950, these newly formed states were largely poor and agrarian, with common cultural factors that placed similar severe constraints on women's autonomy. They adopted very...

In democracies, innovative political institutions have opened up scope for direct public participation often in the form of talk: citizens talking to the state and mutual talk among citizens on matters concerning community development. A prominent example is the Indian gram sabha, or village...

We use a series of controlled experiments, where we manipulate the information that men and women have, to investigate discrimination against women as sources of knowledge---epistemic discrimination---in ordinary daily life in rural north India. The experiments entail three testimonial...