Despite steady progress, women remain underrepresented in politics. In 2025, only 27.4% of parliamentarians worldwide were women, up from 11% in 1995 (UN Women 2026). At the current pace, closing the gender gap in political empowerment will still take more than a century (World Economic Forum 2025).

Yet, increasing the number of women in office does not necessarily translate into stronger substantive representation of women’s issues. Women’s political preferences are far from uniform. As women’s rights expanded over the last decades, women became increasingly divided along lines of marital status, employment, and religion far more than men, with reactionary movements often led by women themselves (Goldin 2023). Similarly, in more gender-equal countries, women’s support for gender-equality policies is often lower than generally perceived (Bursztyn et al. 2023).

This may help explain why the empirical evidence on the policy impact of female politicians is mixed (see Hessami and Lopes da Fonseca 2020 for a review). In lower-income countries, greater female representation in local councils has been shown to increase investment in public goods (Pande 2003, Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004, Bochenkova et al. 2023). In contrast, evidence from higher-income economies often finds limited effects of increased female representation on policy composition (Ferreira and Gyourko 2014, Campa and Bagues 2017, Casarico et al. 2022, Carozzi and Gago 2023), with only a few exceptions (Danzer et al. 2024, Hessami and Baskaran 2020).

These disparities may reflect persistent gender biases and societal norms. By gender norms we refer to shared social expectations about the appropriate roles for men and women, particularly in work and family spheres. While these norms are known to shape women’s labour market opportunities and family decisions (Cortés et al. 2026, Field et al. 2026), they may also influence political priorities.

Women legislators and gender-related legislation

In a recent paper (Carrer and De Masi 2025), we examine how local gender norms shape support for women’s issues within the legislative process. We combine detailed data on all bills sponsored in the Italian House of Representatives between 1987 and 2022 with a novel measure of gender norms at the municipality level. We classify legislation by topic using a dictionary-based algorithm and focus on bills related to gender equality, including family policies, access to elected office, gender-based violence, and reproductive rights.

We document that female politicians are disproportionately active in sponsoring legislation related to women’s issues. Figure 1 shows the share of bill sponsorships by female legislators across policy areas. Women account for nearly 40% of sponsorships in legislation related to women’s issues, despite representing less than 20% of legislators throughout the period of analysis. On average, male legislators sponsor about 2.4 gender-related bills per legislative term, compared with 6.5 for their female counterparts.

Figure 1 Share of bill sponsorships by female legislators, by policy topic

Notes: The figure shows the share of bill sponsorships by female legislators across policy topics. Each bar represents the percentage of signatures by women on all bills sponsored in each topic between 1987 and 2022.

However, this average masks substantial heterogeneity among women: some female legislators never sponsor bills related to gender equality, while others sponsor more than fifty such bills. Among male legislators, both the average number of gender-related bills and the dispersion are much lower. We then investigate whether gender norms help explain this heterogeneity.

Measuring local gender norms

Our key innovation is to measure gender norms at a highly granular geographic level. To do so, we develop a municipality-level gender norms index using publicly available data from the Facebook Marketing API. With more than 45 million active users in Italy,
Facebook provides aggregate information on the local diffusion of interests related to gender issues, such as motherhood, divorce, childcare, or abortion. These data reflect users’ online activity both on Facebook and on external websites linked to it.

Because no single interest allows us to classify an area as more traditional or egalitarian (i.e. less traditional), we combine information across several interests using survey data from the European Values Survey (EVS 2022). Specifically, we train a machine-learning model that predicts survey-based attitudes toward gender roles using the distribution of Facebook interests across regions. The model thus identifies which combinations of interests are associated with more traditional or more egalitarian attitudes. We then apply this model to municipalities, generating a local index of gender norms.

Figure 2 presents the resulting map of gender norms in Italy. As expected, a marked North–South gradient emerges, with more traditional norms (high index, darker areas) concentrated in southern regions. Yet, the map also reveals substantial variation within regions (black boundaries) and narrowly defined commuting zones (grey boundaries). Compared to survey-based indices, the key advantage of the gender norms index is precisely to capture this fine-grained spatial variation in attitudes, which is essential for our identification strategy.

Figure 2 Map of the gender norms index across Italian municipalities

Notes: The figure displays the gender norms index across Italian municipalities, which is based on aggregate data from the Facebook Marketing API. Darker areas correspond to more traditional gender norms (high index), while lighter areas indicate more egalitarian attitudes (low index). Black boundaries identify the 20 Italian regions. Grey boundaries identify 610 commuting zones.

Cultural background and legislative priorities

Exploiting the granular variation of the gender norms index, we link the gender norms of politicians’ birthplaces to their legislative activity. Our empirical strategy compares legislators with similar characteristics who are elected in the same party and electoral district but were born in municipalities with different gender norms. This allows us to isolate the role of cultural background from voter preferences or party ideology.

We find that female legislators born in municipalities with more traditional gender norms sponsor significantly fewer gender-equality bills than their counterparts from more egalitarian areas. On average, more traditional women sponsor about one fewer gender-related bill per legislative term, corresponding to a 15% reduction relative to the average female legislator (or a 32% reduction relative to the average legislator).

For male legislators, the gender norms of their birthplace have no systematic effect on their legislative engagement with gender issues. Moreover, we find no evidence that birthplace norms affect women’s legislative activity in other policy areas (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Impact of gender norms on female sponsorships, by policy topic

Notes: Each point shows the estimated effect of the interaction between being a female legislator and being born in a municipality with more traditional gender norms (high gender norms index). Each coefficient results from a separate regression where the outcome variable is the number of bills sponsored in the policy topic shown on the x-axis. Coefficient estimates are first standardised and then ranked by their magnitude. Negative values indicate that female legislators born in more traditional areas sponsor fewer bills on that topic than those born in more gender-egalitarian areas. Regressions include individual and birth town controls, along with district-by-legislature and party-by-legislature fixed effects. Standard errors are clustered at the birth town level. Estimates are plotted alongside 90% confidence intervals.

Supplementary evidence on voting behaviour further suggests that female legislators from gender-traditional municipalities are also less likely to vote in favour of legislation that is pro-gender equality, thus affecting policy choices. We also conduct additional tests to rule out the possibility that the results are driven by constituency preferences, selection into office, differences in politicians’ characteristics or experience, or broader differences in legislative activity.

Conclusion

Greater legal gender equality is associated with substantial improvements in women’s lives and smaller gender gaps in economic opportunities and outcomes (Goldberg and Djankov 2021). However, persistent gaps in gender-related legislation – such as limited protections against domestic violence and recent political setbacks on abortion access (World Bank 2026) – highlight the importance of understanding what drives policy change.

Our results show that female politicians’ engagement with women’s issues is systematically related to the gender norms of the environments in which they were born, even conditional on their political affiliation and the constituency they represent. Increasing the number of women in politics remains essential to broaden representation and diversify policy priorities.

At the same time, when gender norms differ substantially across regions, counting women in office may not be enough to ensure progress on gender equality. If political institutions become more gender-balanced while social norms remain traditional, progress on gender equality may still be slow. Disentangling gender identity from gender views is essential to understanding representation and policy change.

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