Do Gender Quotas Advantage Minority Ethnicity Women?

• In Event: Gender, Race, and Running for Office

Abstract

Theories of intersectionality posit that ethnic and racial minority women may be doubly disadvantaged in societies where patriarchy and ethnic hierarchy are everyday features of life. But recent studies have posited that instead of facing double jeopardy, minority ethnicity women might actually be advantaged under various gender-based affirmative action initiatives. We test this hypothesis through a multi-decade longitudinal paired comparison examining over 20,000 members of the national assemblies of two most-likely cases – the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (from 1946 to the present) and People’s Republic of China (from 1983 to the present) – both long-standing single-party regimes with tandem quotas for women and ethnic minorities. While ethnic majority males are clearly numerically dominant in both assemblies, we find ethnic minority women have been increasingly preferred by party elites over time compared to ethnic minority men. Through process tracing we arrive at the tentative conclusion that the descriptive representation of ethnic minority women (EMW) is now on the rise because they are perceived as less threatening to majority male dominance. We also document how the increase of EMW has come at the expense of ethnic majority women leading in part to perceptions of zero-sum competition for parliamentary representation between ethnic majority and ethnic minority women.

Author

• Devin K. Joshi, Singapore Management University