Kamya Yadav
Charles R. Kaye Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Center for the Advanced Study of India
University of Pennsylvania
kamyay@sas.upenn.edu
Book Project
My book project, The Political Glass Wall: Origins and Consequences of Women's Wings in Political Parties, examines a widely prevalent yet understudied party institution: women's wings. They exist in nearly 40 percent of parties worldwide, and yet are uncorrelated with the share of women parties nominate. I argue that parties create women's wings to mobilize women voters, not to act as incubators of political leadership. As a result, women's wings enable women's entry into politics but not their advancement. I extend the concept of glass walls to party organizations to describe the organizational division of labor that confines women's wing members to vote and crowd mobilization, away from the consequential party work and decision-making that occurs in the main party organization. Drawing on over 100 elite interviews, electoral data, an original survey and conjoint experiment with 1,054 party elites in two of India's largest parties, and newly collected data on India's national and state party leaders, I show that ostensibly gender-egalitarian institutions can entrench male elite power by creating parallel and unequal career tracks in politics.
