Supervisors: Anders Ryom Villadsen & Jakob Arnoldi
Discussants: Ingo Kleindienst & Sarah Krøtel

Abstract
While there is a large literature in Public Administration on representative bureaucracy, much of it focuses on street-level actors with limited research on whether and how representation occurs at the upper echelons of public organizations. This study aims to advance the literature by examining the impact of women’s representation in top management teams (TMTs) on the adoption of women-oriented policies by municipal governments in China. We use a unique longitudinal data set (2010-2018) that covers the gender composition of mayoral teams in 276 Chinese municipal governments and adoption records of policies targeting to benefit women. The results suggest that compared with TMTs with all males, TMTs that have two or more women are more likely to adopt gender-sensitive policies and tend to adopt a great number of such policies. The active representation effect is stronger in TMTs with more than one woman than TMTs with a solo woman. We also observe that the relationship between gender representation and policy adoption is contingent on women’s representation in provincial leadership positions. The implications for active representation at the top, critical mass, and intergovernmental representation were discussed.

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