Gender and Graft: How Working Women In uence Political Corruption

This article proposes a political economy argument for the consistent empirical observation of a negative relationship between working women and corruption: employed women influence the spending behavior of governments by requiring different public goods than men, thereby increasing the demand for public goods. Barring a significant rise in the government budget, fewer resources remain available for rents, lowering the level of corruption. I also argue that countries with a large public sector that have a high percentage of working women are less corrupt than countries with few working women. The robust empirical findings (136 countries, 20 years) support the hypotheses.