looking at labor supply for public works and remains scant and inconclusive: For the manufacturing sector, Ghani _et al._ (2014) find that female reservation triggered an expansion of the number of informal womanowned establishments without leading to higher female employment. In Uttar Pradesh, Bose and Das (2018) find that having a female leader increased female interest in public works as measured by the number of job cards issued and demand for work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) but failed to affect actual employment. In Andhra Pradesh, Afridi _et al._ (2017) find that in village councils where leadership was reserved for women, NREGS implementation was less efficient and leakage higher than in those where this was not the case, a finding attributed to women leaders’ limited formal education and experience.

In this paper, we use individual data to assess the short- and medium-term impact of female reservation on female labor supply, identify mechanisms that might underpin such changes and, for a subsample for which such data were collected, explore impacts on female empowerment. Identification relies on the fact that, in each period, villages to be reserved were randomly chosen. We analyze individuals’ outcomes by matching data on some 66,362 individuals in 23,350 households over India’s 12 main states from the Rural Economics and Demographic Survey (REDS) to villages’ reservation history. As our data were collected when NREGS was active, we assess if exogenous exposure to female leadership improved women’s ability to take advantage of this program, potentially catalyzing broader changes. By providing estimates of the impact of female reservation in current and the previous election periods, we can assess longer-term effects on labor force participation, agency, demand for work, and involvement in household decision-making.

Three findings stand out: First, contemporaneous reservation affected local governance as measured by the quality of NREGS implementation but had no measurable impact on female labor supply. Second, beyond the reserved period, female leadership reservation had sustained effects on female labor supply to public workfare and to private sector labor markets. Effects were quantitatively large (half a standard deviation) and most pronounced for married women. Third, past reservation also increased women’s income, their demand for work, and their participation in household decisions relating to spending on food items, health, and education, pointing towards potential to affect norms in the longer term.

Our paper contributes to the literature in at least two respects: First, we add to the evidence regarding the impact of gender quotas by showing that, even if women leaders may lack experience or have to contend with male backlash (Gangadharan _et al._ 2016) so that pre-exiting gaps cannot be fully closed (Iyer and Mani 2019), politically empowering women can have positive effects in the medium term, consistent with the notion that agency problems may hinder female political participation (Casas-Arce and Saiz 2015). Second, we show that one of the avenues for political reservation to affect behavioral norms is by improving women’s economic participation, control over resources, and bargaining power. Although workfare can 3