MIT’s Esther Duflo has won this year’s John Bates Clark Medal, the most prestigious award around for young economists. I don’t believe this is the main focus of her research, but I think her 2008 paper “Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias?” (PDF) is interesting and accessible.
The paper is about the vast social experiment that is going on in the Indian village panchayats. Being exposed to women in leadership positions changes attitudes.
These changes in attitude are electorally meaningful: after 10 years of the quota policy, women are more likely to stand for and win free seats in villages that have been continuously required to have a female chief councillor.
