Having the same rights is not the same as having the same freedom to choose; after all, before any laws come into force, social norms are already in operation. They shape what seems possible, appropriate or desirable, and therefore help to define not only results, but the field of choices itself.
touched on this point precisely in the column published in this Folha, and it is worth taking the argument a little further. If social norms help to explain why inequalities persist even when formal rights advance, they also help to understand why so many policies produce modest results: they intervene in the symptom without altering the mechanism that narrows the possibilities.
Representativeness is a good test for this argument, precisely because it is often discussed in a simplistic way. In the public debate, it sometimes appears as an almost automatic solution, sometimes it is discarded as a merely symbolic gesture. Empirical evidence suggests a more complex picture. Its effect depends less on the female presence itself than on the context in which she is inserted and what she is capable of changing around her.
A study by Bagues, Sylos-Labini and Zinovyeva on academic competitions in Italy and Spain helps to highlight this limit. When analyzing committees responsible for university promotions, the authors found that increasing the number of women on these committees did not result in more successful candidates. The composition of the group changed, not the logic of the decision. When evaluation criteria, recognition standards and incentives remain intact, new presences tend to reproduce the process rather than transform it.
But this is not the only way in which representation can operate. In a study of local councils in India, Beaman, Duflo, Pande and Topalova followed what happened in communities where women began to occupy positions of authority. Girls’ educational and career aspirations grew, the gap between what parents wanted for sons and daughters narrowed, the educational gap between teenagers narrowed, and girls spent less time on domestic chores. In this case, representation operated in another way: not as a punctual presence, but as a recurring experience capable of expanding what seemed normal and possible.
This evidence helps to avoid two mistakes: the first is to assume that any form of representation produces automatic change. The second is to conclude that, when this does not happen, it is reduced to an exclusively symbolic effect. However, its impact depends on the mechanism, as it tends to be smaller when it only formally occupies a space already organized by unfair criteria; greater when it changes expectations, shifts perceptions about competence and expands what seems possible.
This set of evidence suggests that the debate about gender inequality gains precision when it stops looking only at the results and starts observing the conditions under which men and women choose. The problem is not only in explicit barriers, but also in the fact that certain trajectories remain more costly, less plausible and less accessible for women. When this happens, equality of rights on paper coexists with unequal freedom and policies that ignore this point can even produce signs of change without resolving what really limits choice.
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