Key Positions in the Gender Quota Effectiveness Debate and Their Quantitative Support

Few human resources practices are simultaneously as popular and controversial as gender quotas. While proponents and opponents agree on the aim to increase female participation, they disagree on the effectiveness of these quotas in achieving this aim (Dahlerup & Freidevall 2010). In the present paper we will investigate the three key controversies which underlie the gender quota effectiveness debate, that quotas do not have a positive, direct effect on increasing the numerical representation of women; that they reduce the qualifications of 'quota women'; that they harm the future career chances of ‘quota women’. For this study we gathered a detailed party level gender policy dataset, as well as monthly individual level career data on complete pre-parliamentary career pathways of all Dutch MPs (N=1,263) from 1945 to 2012, over 22 parliamentary cohorts. We use the variation introduced by Dutch political parties by setting voluntary party quotas as a quasi-experiment and apply several multi-level (logistic) regression models to quantitatively test the three key gender quota effectiveness controversies. Results support the general effectiveness of gender quotas. Quotas are shown to have a direct impact on the representation of women, on top of general trends. We also show that the entry qualifications and future career chances of ‘quota women’ to be generally equal to those of ‘non-quota women’ and men. As such, we conclude that gender quotas increased the representation of women in the Dutch parliament without the two main negative side-effects that are often used as arguments to not implement them.