Women are under-represented relative to their share of the population at all levels of government. If we assume that women and men have different preferences, then that implies that women preferences are often under-represented, and, intrinsically, the policy outcomes would change if the decision is taken by men or by women. Frequently,  a solution proposed to enhance women participation are political reservation policies. It consists in reserving quotas in parties' candidate lists for women by law.   
This drive the authors E. Duflo and R. Chattopadhyay to question if policy maker's identity affects the policy outcome. In order to answer this question, their paper analyzes a randomized experiment made in India, more specifically in the districts of Birbhum (West Bengal) and Udaipur (Rajasthan). The two districts are known for having a well-implemented reservation policy (which works by forcing some randomly selected villages to elect women as Pradhans)  since mid-1990's in their Gram Panchayat (GP), which is a system of village level in charge of providing public goods to the town. The procedure is the following: first, the village choose a council and, and next, the council chooses a Pradhan, the chief.