Evidence from Pakistan demonstrates that, in contexts where men act as gatekeepers, efforts to improve political outcomes for women need to engage men.
Women vote at much lower rates than men in many developing countries. In Pakistan, this gap is particularly stark: women’s turnout was 9.1 percentage points lower than that of men in the 2018 election. This meant that the set of voters who decided the election included 11 million more men than women.
The gender gap in voting matters because women tend to have distinct policy preferences, which are often geared towards better welfare outcomes for women and children (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004, Khan 2020). If women have an inequitable voice in electoral outcomes, policy may skew away from their preferences and hence may reduce women’s welfare. The gender gap also matters for normative reasons: democratic equality is one of the core principles of democracy (Dahl1973).
