Hillary Clinton: a good leader (for a girl)

The possibility that America will elect its first woman president next November has triggered the inevitable onslaught of one-liners, and also a more serious discussion about how America might change with a woman in the Oval Office. As luck would have it, there's new data out there about the shifts that take place when women run the world. Or at least a bunch of Indian villages.

Using opinion surveys and data on local "public goods"—like schools, roads, and water pumps—Duflo and Topalova find that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. But as the opinion polls showed, for all their effectiveness, the women's governance was literally a thankless effort, with the new leaders getting lower approval ratings than their male counterparts.

Countries that come closest to gender parity in government, like Sweden and Finland, are economically advanced democracies with universal health care, child care, and generous maternity and paternity leave policies. Contrast this with the list of nations with zero women in national legislatures—Kyrgyzstan and Saudi Arabia, for example—and the pattern becomes clear: Women in government are associated with lots of good things (PDF). But the obvious problem with this sort of exercise is that Scandinavians are different from Saudis in lots of ways. Their progressive attitudes—not to mention all that free child care—may be what allows women to get elected, not the other way around.