The Policy Bias Of Female Officials In China

In the past 20 years,with the development of gender equality,women’s social rights and status have been steadily improved in China.The proportion of women in China’s leading cadres has also increased significantly,as the CPC Central Committee has constantly proposed to support the development and training of women cadres.Equality between men and women is a basic national policy in China.In order to improve women’s political status and power,since 1995,the State Council has put forward the development goals of ensuring and improving women’s ability to participate in politics and political discussion in all previous "China Women’s development program".Following the expectation of identity theory,as the number of female officials grows,the policy needs and policy preferences of the female group may be better reflected in public policy,which makes female officials and male officials have different policy preferences in some political fields.Because of the traditional family division of labor mode of "outside the male,inside the female",the female lacks competitiveness in the labor market and has been in a weak position in the labor market for a long time,which shapes the preference that women care more about others and are more reluctant to participate in competition,which makes them care more about basic education,social welfare and other social public affairs protecting and improving the interests of the social vulnerable groups,while men are more concerned about the economic affairs.Because of their identity,female officials are more inclined to choose and implement policies that are more in line with the preferences of female groups,including developing education,reducing the use of land finance,reducing investment in promotion competition around economic growth,etc.Reducing the investment of promotion competition around economic growth means reducing the urgency of financial expenditure demand,which also reduces the urgency of land financial utilization.Therefore,female officials may have the policy preference of increasing education expenditure and reducing the use of land finance so as to reduce house prices.Using the data of 285 prefecture-level cities and the data of mayors in China,the results show that,firstly,female mayors significantly increased the proportion of women-friendly expenditures like education to public fiscal expenditure,and significantly reduced the share of non-women-friendly spending such as tech spending in public finances.The result of using the method of difference-in-differences estimation,in the event of taking office of the female mayor,also confirms the above conclusion.Secondly,women mayors significantly reduced the revenue of land transfer and the financial utilization of land in prefecture level cities,which is also confirmed by the method of difference-in-differences estimation in the event of taking office of the female mayor.This means that female mayors have the policy preference of increasing education expenditure and reducing the level of land financial utilization,but have the "crowding out" effect on non-women-friendly expenditure items such as tech spending,which plays an important role in local economic development.Therefore,when designing the system of selecting and motivating officials,the policy authorities may need to balance the positive and negative effects that female officials may have on public policies,and take the specific situation of the region into consideration.In some areas with excessive land finance expansion,it may have some good effect to increase the proportion of female officials when selecting officials.