While some dismiss the quota system as one that clashes with the ideals of the democratic process, there is evidence that these laws help create female role models, and improve educational and professional opportunities for young women.

New research by Rohini Pande, a professor of public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, finds that the quota system designating female leaders for certain village councils in India results in big aspirational gains for girls in those locations. “Quotas play an important role in exposing voters to what women can do,” she says.

“It’s not that they put women on the council and attitudes changed overnight; these attitudinal changes were gradual. But our research shows that perceptions of women as leaders improve.”

Her research analysed data from more than 8,000 surveys of teenagers and their parents in almost 500 villages, a third of which were randomly selected to reserve a seat for a female leader (called a “pradhan”) on the local council. The data showed that compared with places that did not have a quota, the “gender gap in aspirations” closed by 25 per cent in parents, and 32 per cent in teenagers in villages assigned to a female leader for two election cycles.

“Seeing a woman in the village meeting has a big effect,” says Prof Pande.

The push to promote women into political leadership roles gained momentum in the 1980s and early 1990s. It reached fever pitch in 1995, when the United Nation’s conference on women called for at least 30 per cent female representation in national governments.

Today, according to the Quota Project, a joint research undertaking between the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and Stockholm University, half of all countries use some type of gender quota for their parliaments. (However, the global average of seats held by women in national parliaments is still only 18.4 per cent.)

Quotas are gaining traction. Mauritius, which is reforming its British-style electoral system, on January 1 enacted a new law stipulating that at least one-third of the candidates in local elections must be women. Meanwhile, Libya recently proclaimed a 10 per cent quota for women in its election law, and Tunisia used quotas to increase women’s involvement in its last election.

Rwanda – which has some of the most ambitious quota laws in Africa – leads the way on female political governance: women comprise 56 per cent of the country’s parliament. In the UK, by comparison, where some of the political parties have quotas, women make up 22 per cent of the members of parliament in the House of Commons. In the US, which does not have quotas of any type, women constitute 16.8 per cent of the total membership of Congress.

Despite the fact that compulsory allocations have increased women’s participation and representation in political life, their use remains contentious. Critics make the argument that this system is undemocratic, and that it should be up to voters to decide whom they elect.

The issue has also sparked debate in the corporate world. In 2003, Norway was the first country to institute quotas for boards of public companies, and since then Spain, France, the Netherlands, and others have introduced minimum percentages for women directors. Yet many in the business community contend that quotas are bureaucratic and anti-competitive.

There is also concern that mandatory quotas perpetuate tokenism. A study by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business that examined the effect of the Norwegian law on boards and the value of firms, found that many of the new female board appointees lack upper-management experience.

But experience is relative in politics, according to Harvard’s Prof Pande. “Tokenism is harder to levy in politics because the level of experience that makes a good leader is debatable,” she says. “Your qualifications are that you can represent people.”

According to her research, which is published in the journal Science, girls raised in villages with a female leader spent less time doing domestic chores, and – importantly – were more likely to score higher in school exams than girls from other villages. Test scores for boys remained roughly the same.

Parents in villages with a female leader were more likely to say that they wanted their daughters to receive more education, marry later, and have more career opportunities available to them. Prof Pande adds: “The question is: is it the teenage girl who sees [the female leader] as a role model and changes her mind? Or is it her mother who sees [the female leader] and brings home the message ‘This is what you can be’ to her daughter?”

The role-model effect has been well documented in a number of fields. Katherine Milkman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, conducted research on the ways in which gender identity influences the decisions of talented workers to leave their companies.

She and a colleague – Kathleen McGinn, a professor at Harvard Business School – examined six years’ worth of human resources data at a large law firm, and determined that higher proportions of “demographically similar” senior managers reduced turnover of junior employees. In other words, the more women there were at the top, the more women there were at the bottom.

“Women look up and realise ‘There is someone like me succeeding here’, and so they feel it’s possible,” she says. “It’s powerful.”