In recent decades gender quota reforms have often been introduced as an institutional solution to female under representation in legislatures. In this paper, the authors look at whether gender quota reforms have had an impact on female legislators’ floor access. Using an original data set of 65,000 speeches in Portugal from 1999 through 2017, their empirical strategy combines a causal difference-in-differences framework with elite interviews. Their results suggest that, post-reform, female legislators have more floor access but reduced time for each speech. They also show that parties that opposed the reform are more reluctant to allow female legislators floor access. Female legislators are equally likely to access prime-time debates.
