Why Single Member Disctricts are not so women unfriendly as we believe

Comparative studies have often revealed that single-member districts (SMDs) are less favourable to women descriptive representation than multi-member districts (MMDs). However, empirical evidence is not univocal, and the hypothesised causal mechanisms have not been deeply scrutinised. This article, analysing longitudinally an original dataset of about 120.000 candidates at Italian general elections, tries to understand, first, if the correlation between district magnitude and gender representation is genuine and, second, why comparative research almost univocally identifies SMDs as an obstacle to gender representation. Analysing the differential probabilities of election by women and men, the paper will show that SMDs are not as unfavourable to women representation as they are thought to be.