Female political leadership reduced Covid damage in city halls, study shows

It is already known that political leaders have a crucial impact on the social and economic results of a given population under their government. With that in mind, who would you put in charge of your city’s municipal public administration to face the challenge of a serious global crisis: a man or a woman?

Economist Luiz Meloni, professor at USP’s Faculty of Economics and Administration (FEA), says he does not hesitate. “A woman for sure. The scientific literature has already pointed out that, on average, they are better than men in many dimensions of public life.”

He cites studies that indicate an association between women political leaders and improvement in the provision of public goods related to health and education, in addition to a lower propensity to practice acts of corruption. It’s no small thing.

But it was recent research, of which Meloni is a co-author, that cemented his position. Published in the Journal of Economic Development, the study investigated the performance of women leaders during the Covid-19 crisis and found that cities that elected female mayors performed better in containing the first wave of the pandemic than those that elected men.

“The study showed that if you choose a woman as a political leader, you have a better chance of having good crisis management in your municipality”, concludes Meloni. “But since the result is an average, it doesn’t mean that each and every woman performed better than the men.”

In a country that hit the mark of 650,000 deaths caused by the new coronavirus, municipalities ruled by women had, on average, a significant reduction in the number of deaths and hospitalizations per 100,000 inhabitants when compared to those ruled by men.

Municipalities under female leadership also adopted, on average, more so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as mandatory use of masks, closure of non-essential services, limits on agglomerations, reduction of public transport and adoption of sanitary cordons, which limit entry and exit. of people in cities.

The study used information from 1,222 municipalities and was based on an econometric model called discontinuous regression, using databases from the Ministry of Health, the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the National Treasury and a survey carried out with municipalities in partnership with the National Confederation of Municipalities.

“To ensure that the municipalities were comparable, in addition to information such as the size of the city and its population, distribution by age and education, health expenditures before the pandemic and hospital structure, we looked at the 2016 election”, explains Meloni. “And we narrowed the sample down to counties where female candidates competed with male candidates and won or lost by a small difference. These counties were very similar.”

Thus, the study found that the election of women leaders was associated with a drop of about 49 hospitalizations for Covid per 100,000 inhabitants, which represents about 32% of the average rate of cities that elected men.

This means that, while in the prefectures administered by men, there were, on average, 154 hospitalizations per 100,000 inhabitants due to Sars-CoV-2, in cities under female control, this number was, on average, 105 hospitalizations per 100,000. population.

In the case of deaths caused by the new coronavirus, the impact of female political leadership is also significant. While cities with male mayors had, on average, 58.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, municipalities with female mayors recorded 35.1 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

These calculations suggest that if half of Brazilian municipalities had a woman at the head of the mayor, all else being equal, the number of deaths from Covid-19 would have been about 14% lower, saving 75,000 lives.

According to Meloni, “the first thing that could explain this result is health expenditure, but we did not find any difference in health expenditure between municipalities with male and female mayors”. Economists then looked at the aforementioned non-pharmacological measures.

“All municipalities adopted some of these measures, but those led by women implemented 10% more measures than cities with male leaders”, he says.

Meloni says that what surprised him most in the study was the magnitude of the results achieved with small measures adopted by mayors and the maximized effect of these measures in the municipalities where President Jair Bolsonaro won the 2018 elections with a greater margin of advantage, in which the negative impact on deaths and hospitalizations was greater than average.

“Women have made the most difference where Bolsonaro is most popular,” says the economist. If demonstrations by the president against non-pharmacological measures, such as when he promoted gatherings without a mask at the beginning of the pandemic, influenced his voters to disrespect sanitary measures to contain the pandemic, the management of women, adopting more of these protective measures, had a greater impact.

“The results are consistent with the interpretation that, in these places, more people were discrediting both the severity of the pandemic and the effectiveness of preventive measures and, therefore, the performance of female political leaders had an even greater effect.”​