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Abstract: With quotas bringing more and more women into legislatures worldwide, the question remains whether they face discrimination once they make it into legislative office. Using data from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, Kerevel and Atkeson (2013) compare bill sponsorship, bill passage rates, and likelihood of holding a committee chair position among male and female deputies one legislative session before quotas came into force and two sessions after. They nd little evidence that female legislators are marginalized as measured by these three metrics. We do not dispute these findings, but suggest that bill sponsorship and bill passage rates are not the most important measures of power in the Mexican legislature. Instead, the real action happens at the committee level, not just in its leadership, but also in ordinary committee membership. We use the Kerevel and Atkeson original dataset with a new modeling strategy that allows us to explore the potential role of gender marginalization in membership on committees. We nd that although women are about equally likely as men to serve on more prestigious committees, they are signicantly more likely to serve on less prestigious, "female oriented" committees. This suggests that female legislators may be taking on additional legislative work their male counterparts are not, and that gender marginalization continues in Mexico's lower chamber.
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