Health and the Political Agency of Women Sonia Bhalotra and Irma Clots-Figueras Work in Progress Abstract This paper investigates whether the gender of elected leaders who are in power at the relevant age affects the health outcomes of individuals. The health outcome that we focus on is infant mortality. For this, we have sibling-linked data that span about forty years. To investigate channels through which any effects on mortality risk operate, we further analyse data on antenatal care, place of delivery and vaccination rates for children. We test two related hypotheses. First, that female politicians care more about child health than male politicians. Second, that female politicians are more likely than male politicians to give greater weight to girls’ (rather than boys’) health. Individual children and mothers from the second National Family Health Survey of India are matched by cohort and district of birth to a unique dataset of about 25000 politicians elected in the state legislative assembly across 297 districts in 31 years. If political preferences for, say, women, are correlated with health behaviours in unobservable ways then our estimates will be biased. However, our political data allow identification of close elections between women and men, which yield quasi-experimental election outcomes used to estimate the causal effect of the gender of politicians. This paper contributes to a recent literature which shows that the identity of politicians matters over and above party affiliation, with elected leaders tending to favour citizens that they identify with by, for example, race, religion or gender. The questions we explore are pertinent. In 1991, India legislated that one-third of village council members be women, although reservation for women in state governments has not yet been approved. Primary health in India is a majo r welfare issue. Just about half of all women receive antenatal care and as many as two-thirds of women give birth at home. There are some 1.8 million infant deaths each year (about 7% of all births today), and only about half of all children between the ages of 1 and 2 years are fully immunized. Mortality rates are higher for girls and their immunization rates are lower.