How Political Representation Empowers Women

Addressing the question of how to tackle gender inequalities, we test whether women who perceive women’s representation in politics as achievement are empowered. We embed an experiment in an online survey conducted on a sample of 4545 U.S. women, varying whether the number of women in Congress is presented as achievement or reason for concern. We find that women who are presented with the “achievement” frame are more likely to consider job opportunities for a range of jobs. Heterogeneity based on pre-treatment moderators, particularly political partisanship, which correlates with a host of gender attitudes like feelings of marginalization, helps explain variation in treatment effects. The study broadens our understanding of how descriptive representation matters for non-political outcomes, showing that it empowers women to consider applying to more jobs.