Do quotas mandating women’s political representation unsettle social norms enough to foment backlash that precludes future generations of daughters? I examine the extent to which diminishing sons’ traditionally stronger economic and political position alters preferences for male over female offspring. Overall, this analysis provides decisive evidence that backlash immediately follows quota-mandated female representation that enables enforcement of women’s substantial inheritance rights. Exposure to female gatekeepers lowers the proportion of daughters mothers bear by 5 to 20 percentage points, relative to women without access to female representatives. What about women with the greatest bargaining power? New political representation that expands opportunities for women to claim gender-equal economic rights might shift behavior amongst the youngest cohorts of mothers exposed to both changes (female-led political institutions and substantive economic rights) early in familial formation. At the margin, this group of women appear more inclined to give birth to daughters. Overall, analysis suggests a slight shift in favor of bearing and raising healthy sons for all but this youngest cohort of mothers. This chapter finds political representation enabling women to claim crucial economic rights to inherit property is not sufficient on its own to bring about meaningful or benign change.

When can quotas enable representatives and their constituents to upend hierarchies in favor of the women they are meant to empower? "Gatekeeper theory" explains the connection between political representation and economic power. It explores how quotas expanding women’s ability to gain the most influential elected role in local government fundamentally reorder power. Female leaders revolutionize how women occupy the public sphere, create new spaces for women’s benefit, and repurpose the private sphere. Where women replace traditionally male gatekeepers, they catalyze the claiming and enforcement of female rights to a crucial economic resource: land inheritance. This energizes many forms of resistance, particularly in the short term. Most striking is women’s ability to transform conflict over traditional rights into consensus over new distributions of resources when three factors align: access female political representation, substantial economic rights, and social bargaining power. Field research and large-scale data analysis confirm a key window of opportunity for women to secure rights: marriage negotiations—when many valuable resources are distributed. Where female gatekeepers can support women to claim rights at this critical juncture, women can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining.