Women's Political Representation and Fertility: Evidence from Gender Quotas in Sub-Saharan Africa
We study how women’s political representation affects fertility in subSaharan Africa. Leveraging the staggered adoption of reserved-seat gender quotas across the region and a heterogeneity-robust difference-indifferences estimator, we find that quotas increased women’s parliamentary representation by 13.3 percentage points and reduced the total fertility rate by 0.23 births per woman. The effect follows a policy-to-behavior pathway: resources shift toward family planning and reproductive health, contraceptive use increases, and unmet need declines; individual-level data further show delayed marriage and later first births. Women’s political representation thus translates into greater policy emphasis on reproductive health, illustrating how legislative representation shapes policy outcomes.