Asian Perspective Seminar: Jiawei Lyu (University of Toronto)

Title: Preserving Male Representation: Gender Quotas and Bureaucratic Performance in China

Abstract: Hiring quotas can reshape who enters the workforce and how organizations perform. Such policies are often intended to redress disparities arising from past discrimination. I study a gender quota that instead preserves the representation of a historically dominant group: men in China's civil service. After merit-based hiring increased women's share of new recruits, more than two-thirds of county tax bureaus eventually adopted one-to-one gender quotas requiring equal numbers of male and female hires. Using a new dataset constructed from web-scraped, position-level civil service exam records and county tax revenues, I show that counties with a higher share of recent female hires were more likely to adopt quotas, particularly for tax-collection roles. Exploiting variation in the timing and intensity of adoption across counties, I use a matched staggered difference-in-differences design and find that quotas reduce female representation, lower candidate quality, and decrease tax capacity: tax revenue falls by 4.7%, or about $4 million per county per year. Mechanism evidence points to reduced personnel ability and male-dominated institutional practices. These findings show that quotas designed to preserve the representation of historically advantaged groups can impose substantial performance costs, especially in institutions with persistent gender bias.