It’s no secret that throughout the world, women have been historically underrepresented in politics. Even today, there are 37 countries where women hold 

 of the seats in national parliament. To remedy this, many countries have created gender quotas — a kind of affirmative action policy intended to raise the number of women in politics, often by reserving a certain percentage of seats in the national legislature for female politicians. In India, this is exactly what is done at local level of government.

Having women in government has a profound influence on Indian society. When female voices are excluded from politics, so are the issues that affect women. Local councils with high female representation tend to reflect that in the policies they enact, lending greater 

support to issues like water access and welfare programs

, both of which predominantly effect women, as they manage the home. Then, there are the less-noticeable alterations to Indian society — fascinating changes that happen because women in government become symbols of what women can be and achieve.

One of these changes is a decrease in sex selection. India has 

 of female feticide and higher mortality rates for girls. The preference for sons over daughters is deeply engrained in Indian life, and the most 

 comes from a purely economic standpoint: sons are expected to provide for their families, especially as they mature. Sons bring in wealth and property, play important roles in Hinduism, and progress the family lineage. Daughters, meanwhile, are raised for marriage, and sometimes require costly dowries. After the birth of a male, many Indian parents choose to stop childbearing

, men outnumbered women by seven percentage points.

Work by Priti Kalsi, a researcher with the University of Colorado at Boulder, found that increasing women’s political 

leadership may limit this preferential selection

 because leadership elevates the status and desirability of girls. Kalsi’s research found that after women’s political representation was increased through quotas, there was a substantial decrease in child mortality among girls and a significant increase in the likelihood that one of the first three children born to a mother will be a girl — suggesting a decrease in sex-selective abortions and female feticide.

India demonstrates an age-old truth: 
role models matter 
(and not just to children)

The obvious question this research raises is how it is evident that it was women in government, and not some other factor, that led to less sex selection. The answer to this lies in how the quotas were set up. In each election, one-third of village councils are randomly selected to be reserved for a female chief councilor, called a pradhan; since it’s randomized, there shouldn’t be differences between the councils with quotas and without quotas. It’s set up as a sort of natural experiment, making it easier to specifically identify quotas as the cause of social change.

Using this natural experiment again, another study found that girls are more likely to do well in school in districts that had had a female pradhan, as opposed to districts that had yet to elect a woman to the position. 

, surveyed more than 8,000 adolescents and parents in almost 500 villages across India. Where there are women political leaders, female students scored higher in school exams. Meanwhile, boys’ test scores stayed roughly the same regardless of the pradhan’s gender, which suggests that the benefits which girls experience are not related to improvements in the school system itself.

Despite doing better in school, many Indian girls retain less ambitious dreams for themselves, which are shaped by their communities. Historically, wide gaps have existed between what girls and boys aspire to, but the 

 study illustrated that this, too, is changing, as female politicians in India prove that women can choose to be something other than caretakers and wives. In villages that had a female leader for two election cycles or more, the gender gap in parental aspirations for their male and female children was reduced by more than 25 percent, and by 32 percent among adolescents themselves.

With the instillation of India’s gender quotas, there’s been a rise in documented crimes against women. This is not due to an increase in actual crime, but in the rise in crime reporting. Research by Anandi Mani, et al., in a working paper for the 

Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy

 found that after quotas were enacted in India, documented crimes against women rose by 44 percent, sexual assault per capita rose by 23 percent, and kidnapping of women increased by 13 percent. There were no changes in levels of reporting for other crimes, such as robberies, arson, or counterfeiting, suggesting that the change was caused by a rise in the status of women in society, and not a general increase in crime reporting.

When someone cannot see people of their own identity with influence in society, it’s unrealistic to imagine that they can aspire to positions beyond their current situation. These examples from India demonstrate an age-old truth: role models matter.

Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, and Petia Topalova, 

“Female leadership raises aspirations and educational attainment for girls: A policy experiment in India,”

Lakshmi Iyer, Anandi Mani, Prachi Mishra, and Petia Topalova, 

“The power of political voice: Women’s political representation and crime in India,”

Harvard Business School BGIE Unit Working Paper,

“Seeing is Believing: Can Increasing the Number of Female Leaders Reduce Sex Selection in Rural India?”

Discussion Papers in Economics, University of Colorado

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India’s governmental gender quotas have had a real, profound, and positive impact on girls’ lives.

In Indian towns where women are elected, life improves for girls

The rhetoric in Europe’s ongoing immigration debate paints a grim picture of non-European Muslims. They move into Europe, critics charge, and in their refusal to assimilate, reject liberal values and politicize Islam.

Despite the Islam-centric tone of Europe’s immigration debate, migrants to Europe are 

. Including immigration between European countries, Christians comprise 56 percent of the European Union’s foreign-born population, while Muslims make up 27 percent. Even when excluding European-born immigrants, Christian immigrants still outnumber their Muslim counterparts by roughly one million residents.

The voices in the European immigration debate are numerous and far reaching. In the February 2015 issue of the 

, François Foret and Julia Mourão Permoser note that faith-based organizations — most of them Christian —still wield considerable power in the continent’s policymaking.

Religious politics have a strong tradition in Europe. Take Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany: she’s perhaps the most powerful European head-of-state, and her 

political party is Germany’s dominant Christian Democratic Union

Differing from its member states, the EU itself has historically avoided aligning with any religion. (Most notably, a reference to the Christian heritage of Europe was edited out of the preamble of the former European constitution.) If a religious organization wants to have any political influence in the EU, Foret and Permoser observe, they must craft their arguments under a secular disguise, portraying themselves as experts on a given issue.Faith organizations do this through developing immigration know-how on the ground.

A representative of Pax Christi International describes what this looks like:

“To start from the level of the people we are working with means … to listen to their stories and to learn from them.... It is this act of humility that allows us to advocate from the perspective of victims and the poor, the only perspective that makes our work credible in the eyes of those we want to influence.”

That expertise goes a long way, and the human network that comes along with such outreach and field work gives faith-based groups the organizational infrastructure to persuade a government into action.

Partnering with secular groups, Christian organizations pressured FRONTEX, the agency for European border management, to host an advisory forum on immigration rights. After a prominent advocacy effort, the forum was created, with the Jesuit Refugee Service serving as the co-chair. Not only did Christian-aligned groups get a seat at the table, they sat at the head of it.

Despite the EU’s secularism — or perhaps because of it — Christian groups have found new relevance on pressing issues.

These groups own a symbolic credibility merely because of their Christian roots — a credibility that is not extended to other faith-based organizations, most notably those that are Muslim. As Foret and Permoser explain, “The main Catholic and Protestant organizations benefit from the fact that they are linked to the ancient majority churches whose positions are taken for granted.” Since Christian values developed alongside much of European culture, their presence is so comfortable that, with new secular language, they are not seen as religious so much as just a natural part of the European landscape.

Even while Muslim communities are active in local and national issues, their presence is marginal at the supranational level. In the EU, Foret and Permoser say that despite a secular face, “religion still works as a cultural marker enabling traditional (mostly Christian) players to have a greater legitimacy in European deliberations than those perceived as newcomers.”

And yet, they use this legitimacy to embrace immigrants, many of whom are themselves Muslim. Christian organizations, write Foret and Permoser, see “lobbying for a more liberal migration policy as a tool … to achieve their real objective, which is to protect the dignity of the person — a concept strongly anchored in Christian theology.”

Immigration policy determines who can claim particular identities. It declares who is welcomed and who is excluded; who can access certain rights and who cannot. And as religion defines “the symbolic boundaries of belonging to the political community,” it is paramount in the ongoing immigration debate.

While Europe’s hot-button issue is Muslim immigrants, Christian interest groups happen to be among their biggest advocates. As one interviewee tells Foret and Permoser, all human beings are “citizens in the household of God.”

François Foret and Julia Mourão Permoser, “Between faith, expertise and advocacy: the role of religion in European Union policy-making on immigration,” J

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While Europe’s hot-button issue is the arrival of Muslim immigrants, Christian interest groups happen to be among their biggest advocates.

Immigrants to Europe find an ally: Christian groups

Millennium Summit in the year 2000, the United Nations created the Millennium Development Goals

 (MDGs), eight aims for international development 

in key areas including poverty, school enrollment, and child mortality.

historic effort to coordinate myriad global development missions

 that had never truly been unified before.

Fifteen years later, the MDGs’ December 2015 expiration date is approaching. Now, the international community is working to continue the legacy with a new set of objectives: 

 (SDGs), which will likely be adopted at the UN General Assembly in September 2015. As the name suggests, the new goals have an environmental scope — an acknowledgement that the environment and healthy human development are interdependent. In an attempt to address the shortcomings of its predecessor, the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals differ in several important ways.

Despite their international scope, the 2000 MDGs did not derive from a particularly inclusive negotiation process. The MDGs, writes 

, “are sometimes considered donor driven, pushed by developed countries onto developing ones.” The real authors of the MDGs, it turns out, were technocrats from the developed world, who, argues Ordóñez, took little to no input from the Global South. This raises serious questions: this is “development” for whom? By whom? This time around, says Ordóñez, “The process to design a new development agenda is now unthinkable without the debate and participation of the Global South.” Many of these excluded countries are now demanding a voice.

UN Open Working Group began the negotiations for the post-2015 SDGs

, with 20 of the 30 seats filled by representatives from countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Public officials, journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and academics all over the world have participated, and more than 

have voiced their perspectives through the World We Want Initiative, sharing their visions for the shape and aims of international development efforts.

” is another new concept for the 2015 SDGs. “Good governance” means an accountable, transparent government that fights corruption, assures equal treatment, and seeks to protect its most vulnerable citizens. States with characteristics of good governance have been found to have 

Good governance did not figure into the MDGs. At the time, the concept was stigmatized by comparisons to unpopular IMF and World Bank policies in the 1990s that made loans contingent on economic liberalization. But this time around, good governance remained on the table. The World We Want Initiative contributed data on the subject: surveying individuals and asking them to rank sixteen key development goals, their study found that good governance was, on average, one of the top concerns.

Framing fair government as a key ingredient for development elevates the issue, and not just for developing countries. Martin Edwards and Sthelyn Romero, researchers at Seton Hall University, argue developed countries ought to also use these goals to help propel better institutions domestically. In Europe, that may mean addressing the social cost of austerity. While “in the United States,” write Edwards and Romero, “ongoing challenges include the proper role of government surveillance, continuing controversies about voter registration, and the growing debate about the role of the police force.”

The post-2015 goal calls for good governance also at the international level. Critics of international bodies have long argued that these organizations merely reinforce the power of some countries over others. A good governance solution would entail equal representation of countries in international organizations, including the UN and the 

Good governance efforts have traditionally focused on national and international bodies. 

David Satterthwaite, senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development

, explains that exclusion of local governments from the SDG framework is problematic, given that the local levels often have the most immediate impact on individuals’ lives. Because they are closest to the people, they are integral to educating, mobilizing, and listening to the needs of the people.

While goals for local governance are missing from the SDGs, not much else is. Almost every major interest group has tried to write in their pet cause, resulting in 

How can this list of goals best be achieved in the post-2015 agenda? How can we successfully learn from the experiences with the Millennium Goals? Who implements them? Will they be merely symbolic?

Although much is left to be sorted out, it is clear that there has never been such a moment of global devotion to ending poverty. “Governments, businesses, scientists, philanthropists, and people from all walks of life are willing to contribute,” write Kharas and Zhang. “The challenge that remains is to merge these forces together to address the interlinked scourges of conflict, poverty, environmental degradation, and climate change and to create a life of dignity for all.”

The SDGs may, in fact, affect the course of this century. But the road to their realization is long. With ratification still three months away, the countries have their work cut out for them.

New Agenda, New Narrative: What Happens After 2015?

 “Perspectives from the Global South on Post-2015,

Martin S. Edwards and Sthelyn Romero, “

Governance and the Sustainable Development Goals: Changing the Game or More of the Same?

Guiding the Goals: Empowering Local Actors

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The Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015. What’s different about the proposed post-2015 development agenda?

What goals should guide international development?

In New York’s Times Square, gigantic video billboards illuminate the words: “#BirthControlHelpedMe have my son.” Planned Parenthood is leading this neon-lit campaign, a rallying cry in response to a congressional budget proposal that 

eliminates funding for Title X Family Planning

. Encouraged by the ad campaign, some women are taking to social media with the hashtag #BirthControlHelpedMe to 

share their personal testimonies of the importance of access to contraceptives

. “#BirthControlHelpedMe determine that I could be the most independent woman I wanted to be” 

. “BirthControlHelpedMe raise and provide for the 2 children I chose to have,” 

Guttmacher Institute study, a majority of women

 stated that birth control enables them to support themselves financially (56 percent), complete their education (51 percent), take better care of themselves and their families (63 percent), and get or keep a job (50 percent). Among women with incomes under $75,000, 

44 percent reported that they want to limit or delay their childbearing

 because of economic hardship. For that to happen, birth control is essential.

When birth control is unavailable, poverty becomes cyclical. Impoverished women are less able to choose when and how many children they have. Oftentimes, those children are raised in poverty, and will grow to experience similar disparities. Brookings Institution experts Richard Reeves and Joanna Venator have found that the lower a woman’s income, the less likely she is to use contraceptives. Compared to their wealthier counterparts, 

rates of unintended pregnancy are much higher among women who belong to demographic groups that traditionally have limited social mobility

 — women of color and women with lower levels of educational attainment, for instance — further entrapping disadvantaged women and committing their children into cyclical poverty.

It’s a common misconception that birth control is easy to come by and affordable to buy. It is, in fact, quite expensive — 

especially for those without health insurance

 that for uninsured Americans, the potential annual cost of oral contraceptives alone is $1,210, an impossibly large sum for many people.

The economic burden of these costs contributes to inconsistent and discontinued use of contraceptives among low-income women. In a 

 of women aged 18–34 with household incomes below $75,000, found that cost led many women to cut corners with their birth control, skipping pills, delaying prescriptions, or adopting a one-month-on, one-month-off approach to taking the pill. One in four women who struggle financially are forced to take such measures; among women with financial stability, the rate is roughly one in seventeen.

Beyond inconsistent oral contraceptive use, low-income women are less likely to access the most effective forms of birth control. Hormonal implants and intrauterine devices (IUDs) have 

success rates of 99 percent in preventing pregnancy

 — far more effective than birth control pills or condoms. These long-acting, reversible methods need zero maintenance, taking human error out of the equation while lasting between three and ten years. But the frontloaded cost of these methods restricts their availability to women with low incomes; the most effective forms of birth control are used mostly by affluent women.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) intended to expand healthcare insurance to almost all Americans, regardless of their income. To do this, the ACA expanded Medicaid to fill in historical gaps in healthcare coverage, 

covering all individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line

 (previously, Medicaid was only available to families making less than 44 percent of the poverty line). After a 

, the proposed expansion became a state-by-state choice. 

Twenty-one states opted not to expand Medicaid

, creating a coverage gap for families whose incomes are too high for Medicaid coverage, but who are still not wealthy enough to be eligible for a subsidy. Nationally, almost 

. Women in the coverage gap are left without insurance, and as such, are forced to bear the oftentimes-unattainable costs of birth control, affording them little agency in their reproductive decisions.

Where the government and market leave coverage gaps, women’s health clinics often 

. Planned Parenthood, for instance, primarily serves low-income women — 

75 percent of their clients make less than 150 percent of the poverty line

. Federal budget cuts to Title X Family Planning, along with state budgetary proposals to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, have caused 

systematic closures of clinics across the country

. If passed, the budget cuts being considered by Congress would further break apart this cracking funding system.

We’ve seen it already. Texas, the state that enacted the nation’s largest budget cuts to family planning organizations, forced the 

closure of 25 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas

. As a result, clinics were only able serve 54 percent of the clients that they had prior to the cuts. Long-acting, reversible contraception methods, initially offered at 71 percent of clinic sites, became significantly less accessible, available at only 46 percent of them. 

A recent study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project

 surveyed 300 pregnant women who sought an abortion in Texas. Approximately half responded that they were “unable to access the birth control” in the three months before they became pregnant.

In all the talk of budgets, poverty lines, percentages, and politics, it’s easy to forget that the issue is, at its core, about people. Policy is, by its nature, abstract, but the people it affects are real. Unless Medicaid access is expanded and Title X Family Planning funds remain available, life will get worse for many women, the cycle of poverty will continue, and the underlying issues will linger on without a hope of being solved.

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As Congress considers a budget that would cut funding for family planning, it’s worth remembering the difficulties that many women face in accessing contraceptives — and why that access is so important.

For poor women, barriers to birth control access could soon get worse

Over the duration of the Syrian Civil War, there have been countless instances of nationwide internet, mobile phone service, and electrical blackouts. A 

 by Anita R. Gohdes, a researcher at University of Mannheim, argues that these instances are not accidental. Instead, they are strategically executed by the Syrian government as a part of their military strategy against rebels.

It’s not new for incumbent regimes to use internet blackouts to squash opponents — both real-life and imagined. In the 2009 uprisings in Iran, the government allegedly disrupted internet access soon after the elections, while text messages were blocked during the entire election period. The regimes in Libya and Egypt acted similarly during antigovernment demonstrations in 2011, cutting off Internet access in a failed attempt to hold onto power.

The Syrian government clearly understands the importance of a strong online presence. 

President Bashar Al-Assad’s dynamic Instagram account

 updates the world on his goings on, with the evidence of a civil conflict curiously absent from his narrative. Given the Assad regime’s robust Internet presence, what advantage do they (or other regimes) gain from limiting internet access? It all has to do with the myriad ways technology has changed how war is fought.

“The civil war in Syria presents the first case of large-scale civil conflict that has been painstakingly captured, documented, and communicated via the internet,” 

. Whether through YouTube videos, tweets, or Facebook posts, the internet has been key to moving information out of Syria and into the broader world. For rebels inside the country, smartphones allow for speedy coordination of people, strategy, goods, and, ultimately, mobilization. Geographical location systems and apps like Google Maps and Google Earth enable rebel groups to target regime forces with “a level of precision that was not available a decade ago,” writes Gohdes.

Recent interviews with members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA)

 offer further insight into the practical uses of smartphones in wartime Syria:

“Every fighter seems to have at least one mobile phone, used to speak with families, Skype ... and even advise Syrian soldiers how to defect to the opposition. Some note the difference a generation can make to the fate of their challenge against the government — and providing video evidence of atrocities and war crimes that are corroding the legitimacy of the regime.”

Gohdes’ study finds that short, nationwide shutdowns have been used in order to disrupt digital networks and win short-term military victories against rebel groups. Using a Poisson exponentially weighted moving average model to analyze the correlation between internet shutdown and increases in the number of deaths among antigovernment forces, Gohdes found that “on average, the level of violence increases by 26.3 percent on the day prior to an internet outage. During the actual blackout, violence is predicted to increase by 8.6 percent, and when looking at the time window, the average increase is predicted to be almost 47 percent.”

The graphs below show the number of deaths per day in 

 (a) and rural Damascus (b) in 2012, with the orange-shaded days representing periods when the internet was down nationwide. During the internet shutdowns, the death counts are remarkably higher, suggesting that the shutdowns have been effective for the regime, at least in the short term.

Some observers have speculated that shutting down the internet is a strategic choice by the Assad regime, giving them cover to commit mass atrocities while opponents are unable to tell the international community in realtime. Ultimately, Gohdes argues that this is not the case, pointing out that the victims during internet shutdowns are more likely to be civilians — a different population than those killed in non-shutdown times (who are more likely to be insurgents). Moreover, significantly increased fighting occurs in the day prior to blackouts, which perhaps would not be the case if the government was using the shutdown to hide an atrocity from the international community.

No one seems to know when the conflict will end in Syria or when people will be able to rebuild their communities. One thing that is known: the internet is rapidly changing the way insurgency warfare is fought.

“Pulling the Plug: Network Disruptions and Violence in Civil Conflict,”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/1000 Words

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Like regimes throughout the world, Syria’s Assad has routinely shut down his nation's internet access in order to secure military victories. What is it about the internet that so threatens the world's despots?

War in the age of the smartphone

What do we mean when we talk about “caregiving”?

In the United States, the term can conjure thoughts of looking after a loved one who is ill — a son or daughter home sick from school, or an elderly parent who struggles to live independently. But “care” can be extended to mean much more: care of loved ones, yes, but also household work or voluntary aid of others in the community.

write Deepta Chopra and Caroline Sweetman in 

. “It not only sustains and reproduces society, but also underpins all development progress.” Yet despite its central importance in every culture, “the vast majority of care work is done for free, at home,” where it is “widely seen as a female responsibility.”

The participation of women in public life, politics, and business is growing phenomenally throughout the world, but perhaps nowhere has this transition been more profound or rapid as in Rwanda. After the 1994 Rwandan genocide, 

women took on leading roles in the reconstruction of both the economy and the social fabric

 of their nation. In the electoral realm, minimum gender quotas were introduced for the national legislature — a major reason why Rwanda now has 

the most heavily female government in the world

, with women comprising 64 percent of the country’s national parliament.

While the public roles of Rwandan women have changed rapidly, 

 shows that the progress has been slower in private life. 

 found that on average, men in Rwanda spend one-third as much time as their female counterparts performing household tasks, like cooking or fetching water. As a result, women are left with substantially less time and opportunity to balance domestic duties with paid work outside the home. Combining the amount of time spent on unpaid care work and outside-the-home paid work, the average Rwandan woman works 11 hours more each week than the average Rwandan man.

 are working to redistribute the burden of care work and help men learn new ways to constructively contribute in the household — involvement that dissuades unequal power and physical violence, and instead cultivates healthy emotional connections. At least 48 classes on fatherhood are currently in session across Rwanda, and more than 600 men and their partners have already participated in similar group education programs. These classes promote equal participation in caregiving, focusing on maternal, newborn, and child health; men learn the skills needed to carry out the sorts of tasks typically reserved for women, including feeding, washing, and how to healthily interact with infants and older children.

Despite strong conservative social norms in rural Rwanda, where men are not expected to have physical contact with infants, after attending these classes and outreach programs, men report becoming active participants in child care. One father explained his experience to Doyle’s team:

“I was very happy to carry my baby. The first person I saw said, ‘this is not normal.’ Another woman came and she said they would find a woman to help me. I told her that I know how to carry the baby, and showed her what I had learned. They were shocked.” 

After completing training sessions, participating couples saw an improvement in power relations. Fathers reported that they began openly communicating with their partners about finances and sharing financial and household decisions. Admitting that previously they hadn’t always spent money in ways beneficial to the family, some men said that open discussions with their partners created shared goals and greater mutual respect.

Beyond communication, some men have taken on new domestic responsibilities, including cleaning and cooking, which are typically viewed as wives’ responsibilities. Although the men took convincing that they could or should take on these traditionally female roles, Doyle and her coauthors write that the experience led many participants to question their own preconceived definitions of masculinity and “what it takes to be a man.” In effect, sharing care work frees both women and men from the “restrictions of traditional and restrictive gender roles.”

Despite progress, challenges linger — each of these households exists in a broader community, few of which are supportive of such drastic changes in gender norms. Many in rural Rwandan communities view care work by men as “a reflection of their subordination to their wives,” writes Doyle. Researchers heard from men who confided that they were afraid of being stigmatized over their newly shared domestic responsibilities. For that reason, some men hid their care work from the community. Other men say they do not fear the stigma because they know the tangible benefits that such changes can bring.

In the United States, as guaranteed paid family & medical leave again enters the political fray, there’s a lesson from Rwanda’s example: By promoting care work as the responsibility of everyone, we elevate its importance while tearing down outdated gender roles.

 Kate Doyle, Jane Kato-Wallace, Shamsi Kazimbaya & Gary Barker, 

“Transforming Gender Roles in Domestic and Caregiving Work: Preliminary Findings From Engaging Fathers in Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health in Rwanda,”

“Introduction to gender, development and care,”

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Caregiving and domestic work are often treated as responsibilities exclusively for women. Can traditional, patriarchal communities accept that masculinity can coexist with care work?

Miriam Kelberg