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In 1994 the leading Swedish party the Social Democrats made it their policy to have women on every other electable position. This policy obviously increased the

In 1994 the leading Swedish party the Social Democrats made it their policy to have women on every other electable position. This policy obviously increased the number of female candidates the party fielded but, according to research, also increased the average competence level of the candidates. Contrary to common(?) wisdom, the competence of female candidates that took positions from male candidates were generally equal to or higher than the men that they replaced. Thus the fear that gender quotas that favor women in politics will decrease competence seem unfounded as it is contradicted by research. Furthermore, the research may also indicate that men has some inherent trait unrelated to their competence that gives them an advantage over women. Parties generally select their candidates through competitions and, on the local level, they often amount to nothing more than popularity contests... This process may be inherently biased against women. The research is here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20160080 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20160080 I'm sure anyone who frequents HN is able to find and read the full article online. Feel free to read it before criticizing. :) The authors define competence as a combination of educational attainment with income level compared to the mean. So it's a very crude metric, but similar metrics have been used to measure competence in other contexts.

fighterpilot 5y ago
The abstract doesn't say what you're saying. It says that the competence of men increased on average because the worst men got kicked out. Which is obviously what's going to happen. If you take a class of people and remove the bottom half, the average of the remaining people will necessarily be improved.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Isn't that... exactly the point?
  - Jensson 5y ago
    No, the study doesn't even compare men and women. It compares men to men and women to women. It doesn't say anything at all about the competence of the newly added women compared to the competence of the kicked out men, since it has no absolute values of competence in the study. It just has deltas for men and deltas for women, so you can't compare. So all we learned is that reducing the amount of positions available to men will kick out the less competent men first. We didn't learn whether the total competence of the group got increased after gender quotas compared to before.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      You are absolutely right. It's not clear from the abstract whether there is a buried absolute comparison. The idea that the average of the group as a whole is raised seems so obvious I didn't even consider a reality where less competent men were replace by even less competent women. Edit (oh look a full text article, I didn't expect to see a link so I assumed it was just an abstract link). What it does say at least is that while the quota removed a fraction of men that turned out to be less competent than those that were removed, thereby improving the average competence of the remaining group of men, the added group of women did not have lower competence than the existing group (which would perhaps have been expected). For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women. Since men and women aren't compared in absolute terms, this doesn't mean there was an increase in competence either. But it does say that it wasn't a replacement of the group of low competence men (compared to their peers) with a group of low competence women (compared to their female peers). So that does suggest something (which the article does note), for example that the pool of competent women could be larger.
    - geofft 5y ago
      I'm a little confused by the conventions of this article (this isn't my field), but I think Table 4 on page 2226 and Figure 4 on page 2228 (and the surrounding text) are in fact looking at the total competence of the group before and after gender quotas.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        The reason it is so strange is that it has different data for the men and women, they used among other things the military intelligence test which only men takes and income to measure competence. Income is definitely not a fair competence measure between men and women so you can't use that either, so it makes sense that they didn't compare competence directly. So I am pretty sure that graph assumed that men and women had the same competence before, as the measures they had weren't comparable at all between the groups.
Barrin92 5y ago
should be fairly obvious. There's no reason to assume the competence to govern differs significantly between the sexes (by definition a good democracy is representative), the fact that in many countries women constitute less than 20%-30% of representatives is obviously going to lower the performance of government. Same observation could be made about age. If you installed a quota tomorrow to make government representative on that metric you'd eliminate a huge number of quasi zombies from power.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I know that quotas are a good idea for some people, but I believe the result would be absolute horrible. I though we would be wiser than this by now... Conservatives are somehow more successful to bring women into politics than the "liberal" approach.

fighterpilot 5y ago

The abstract doesn't say what you're saying. It says that the competence of men increased on average because the worst men got kicked out. Which is obviously what's going to happen. If you take a class of people and remove the bottom half, the average of the remaining people will necessarily be improved.

alkonaut 5y ago
Isn't that... exactly the point?
- Jensson 5y ago
  No, the study doesn't even compare men and women. It compares men to men and women to women. It doesn't say anything at all about the competence of the newly added women compared to the competence of the kicked out men, since it has no absolute values of competence in the study. It just has deltas for men and deltas for women, so you can't compare. So all we learned is that reducing the amount of positions available to men will kick out the less competent men first. We didn't learn whether the total competence of the group got increased after gender quotas compared to before.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    You are absolutely right. It's not clear from the abstract whether there is a buried absolute comparison. The idea that the average of the group as a whole is raised seems so obvious I didn't even consider a reality where less competent men were replace by even less competent women. Edit (oh look a full text article, I didn't expect to see a link so I assumed it was just an abstract link). What it does say at least is that while the quota removed a fraction of men that turned out to be less competent than those that were removed, thereby improving the average competence of the remaining group of men, the added group of women did not have lower competence than the existing group (which would perhaps have been expected). For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women. Since men and women aren't compared in absolute terms, this doesn't mean there was an increase in competence either. But it does say that it wasn't a replacement of the group of low competence men (compared to their peers) with a group of low competence women (compared to their female peers). So that does suggest something (which the article does note), for example that the pool of competent women could be larger.
  - geofft 5y ago
    I'm a little confused by the conventions of this article (this isn't my field), but I think Table 4 on page 2226 and Figure 4 on page 2228 (and the surrounding text) are in fact looking at the total competence of the group before and after gender quotas.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      The reason it is so strange is that it has different data for the men and women, they used among other things the military intelligence test which only men takes and income to measure competence. Income is definitely not a fair competence measure between men and women so you can't use that either, so it makes sense that they didn't compare competence directly. So I am pretty sure that graph assumed that men and women had the same competence before, as the measures they had weren't comparable at all between the groups.

Barrin92 5y ago

should be fairly obvious. There's no reason to assume the competence to govern differs significantly between the sexes (by definition a good democracy is representative), the fact that in many countries women constitute less than 20%-30% of representatives is obviously going to lower the performance of government. Same observation could be made about age. If you installed a quota tomorrow to make government representative on that metric you'd eliminate a huge number of quasi zombies from power.

raxxorrax 5y ago
I know that quotas are a good idea for some people, but I believe the result would be absolute horrible. I though we would be wiser than this by now... Conservatives are somehow more successful to bring women into politics than the "liberal" approach.