The central question addressed by the study is deceptively simple: does the level of a nation’s productive capacity condition the extent to which gender inclusion translates into better governance? Productive capacity, in the economic literature, refers to the combination of resources, infrastructure, technological capability, institutional quality, and human capital that determines what an economy can produce and how efficiently it can do so. Economies with high productive capacity tend to have diversified industrial bases, reliable energy and transport systems, and educated workforces, while low-capacity economies often depend on narrow resource extraction and face persistent institutional constraints.

The theoretical logic connecting these concepts runs in both directions. On one side, stronger governance—characterized by rule of law, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, control of corruption, and accountability—can expand opportunities for women by enforcing anti-discrimination protections, opening access to education and credit, and creating formal channels for political participation. On the other side, greater gender inclusion can improve governance outcomes by diversifying the perspectives represented in decision-making bodies, reducing corruption risks, and aligning public policy more closely with the needs of the full population rather than a narrow subset.

Productive capacity enters this relationship as a potentially decisive moderating factor. Where economies possess the infrastructure and institutional depth to convert inclusion into concrete participation—through functioning labor markets, accessible education systems, and administrative machinery capable of implementing policy—gender inclusion is more likely to produce measurable governance gains. In settings where productive capacity is weak, formal inclusion may remain largely symbolic, with women represented in institutions that lack the resources or authority to effect change.

This distinction matters for policymakers because it suggests that promoting gender inclusion in isolation may yield disappointing results if the underlying economic and institutional substrate is underdeveloped. Conversely, investments in productive capacity—industrial diversification, digital infrastructure, energy reliability, and skills development—may amplify the returns to inclusion policies such as gender quotas, leadership training, and legal reforms. The study’s framing implies that the two agendas are complements rather than substitutes: capacity builds the stage on which inclusion can perform.

The research sits within a broader empirical literature in development economics and political science that has documented correlations between women’s political representation and outcomes such as reduced corruption, greater investment in public goods like health and education, and more durable peace agreements. Cross-national studies have repeatedly found that higher shares of women in legislatures are associated with stronger governance indicators, although establishing causality remains methodologically challenging because gender norms, income levels, and institutional quality tend to move together over time.

By introducing productive capacity as a moderating variable, the study offers a way to account for heterogeneity in these findings. Countries at similar income levels may differ sharply in their structural capabilities, and the same inclusion policy may therefore produce different results depending on whether the surrounding economy can absorb and institutionalize the change. This perspective aligns with structuralist traditions in development economics, which emphasize that outcomes depend not only on policy choices but on the productive structure of the economy itself.

The publication appears in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, an open-access journal published by Springer Nature that publishes peer-reviewed research spanning the social sciences and humanities. The article carries the DOI 10.1038/s41599-026-08982-3 and is available through the journal’s website. As with all work in this field, the findings invite further empirical testing across country samples, time periods, and measurement approaches, particularly as new datasets on economic complexity and institutional performance become available.

For researchers, the study underscores the value of interaction-based designs that test not just whether two variables are related, but under what conditions that relationship strengthens or weakens. For practitioners in international development and governance reform, the message is that gender inclusion strategies are most likely to succeed when they are embedded in broader programs of capacity building—ensuring that the institutions women join are equipped to deliver the improvements that inclusive governance promises.

One useful way to situate the study is within the long-running debate over how to measure both of its core constructs. Gender inclusion is typically operationalized through indicators such as female labor force participation, seats held by women in national parliaments, educational attainment gaps, and indices that composite these dimensions into a single score. Each measure captures a different facet of inclusion: parliamentary representation reflects formal political voice, while labor force participation reflects economic integration. Because these dimensions do not always move together—a country may have high female employment alongside minimal political representation—researchers must be explicit about which aspect of inclusion they are testing, and the moderating role of productive capacity may differ across them.

Productive capacity presents its own measurement challenges. Recent work by international organizations has developed composite indices that combine measures of energy infrastructure, transport and digital connectivity, structural change away from primary commodities, and the sophistication of exported goods. A related strand of literature on economic complexity infers productive knowledge from the diversity and ubiquity of the products a country exports, treating the export basket as a window into the accumulated capabilities of its firms and workforce. These approaches share the premise that what an economy can do is distinct from how much income it currently generates, which is precisely the distinction the study leverages when it argues that capacity, rather than income alone, conditions the governance returns to inclusion.

The historical record of gender quota adoption offers a concrete illustration of why this conditioning matters. Well over one hundred countries have now introduced legislative quotas of some form, ranging from reserved seats to voluntary party quotas, and the resulting variation in outcomes is striking. In some settings, quotas produced durable cohorts of legislators who reshaped committee agendas and oversight practices; in others, women entered chambers with limited committee assignments, short tenures, or weak party support, and the anticipated governance effects failed to materialize. Observers of these divergent trajectories frequently point to features that resemble productive capacity in the study’s sense: the professionalism of the civil service, the reliability of public administration, and the broader economic base that gives legislatures real resources to allocate.

The corruption channel deserves particular attention because it has generated one of the most cited empirical regularities in this literature. Cross-national analyses have repeatedly reported that higher shares of women in parliament are associated with lower perceived corruption, and early interpretations framed this as evidence that women are inherently less tolerant of corrupt exchanges. Subsequent scholarship has complicated that reading, suggesting that the relationship may reflect the institutional environments in which women gain office rather than any dispositional difference. Liberal democracies with strong rule of law both elect more women and exhibit less corruption, making it difficult to isolate the effect of gender itself. A moderating variable such as productive capacity offers a more structural interpretation: the same woman legislator operates within very different opportunity structures depending on the administrative and economic machinery surrounding her office.

There is also a macroeconomic dimension worth noting. Growth research over the past two decades has emphasized that sustained convergence depends on structural transformation—the reallocation of labor from low-productivity agriculture toward manufacturing and services—rather than on factor accumulation alone. If gender inclusion contributes to governance, and governance contributes to the quality of public investment and the enforcement of property rights, then the interaction the study examines may feed back into the very productive capacity that conditions it. This possibility of circular causation is a familiar challenge in development research, and it cautions against reading any single estimated coefficient as a complete description of the system.

Methodologically, studies of this kind typically rely on panel data covering many countries and years, with interaction terms used to test whether the slope linking inclusion to governance varies with the level of capacity. Such designs face well-known hurdles: omitted variables that correlate with both capacity and governance, reverse causality running from institutional quality to economic structure, and the sensitivity of results to sample composition and estimator choice. Robustness in this literature is usually assessed by varying measures, excluding regions, and testing alternative governance indices drawn from expert assessments, survey-based perceptions, and objective indicators. Readers interpreting the findings should keep in mind that interaction effects in cross-national panels are notoriously sensitive to these choices, even when the underlying theory is sound.

The policy translation also requires care. If capacity amplifies the returns to inclusion, then sequencing becomes a live question: should donors and governments invest in industrial and administrative capability first, or pursue inclusion and capacity simultaneously? The complementarity framing suggests simultaneous pursuit, since waiting for capacity to mature before opening political space risks entrenching exclusion, while pursuing inclusion without capacity risks symbolic representation. Practical programs that pair quota reforms with civil service professionalization, digital government infrastructure, and vocational education embody this logic, though rigorous evaluations of such paired interventions remain scarce.

Finally, the study contributes to a growing effort to bring structural economics and political sociology into a single analytical frame. Much of the governance literature has treated institutions as exogenous rules to be transplanted, while much of the gender literature has treated norms as the primary constraint. By foregrounding the productive structure of the economy as the terrain on which both rules and norms operate, the research points toward an integrated account in which economic capabilities, social inclusion, and institutional quality co-evolve—a perspective likely to inform the next generation of empirical work on development outcomes.

Subject of Research: The moderating role of productive capacity in the relationship between gender inclusion and governance quality.

Article Title: Gender inclusion and governance: the role of productive capacity

Article References: Gender inclusion and governance: the role of productive capacity. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-08982-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-08982-3

Keywords: gender inclusion, governance, productive capacity, political participation, institutional quality, development economics, women in politics, economic complexity, public policy, corruption, human capital, Social Sciences Communications

The research team, led by Annabel Wanza Mbithi of Chuka University together with Peter Kimanthi Mbaka and Kenkelvin Kimathi Mbaka, and including Victor Okoth Saoke of the University of Embu, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what determines how much students say they participate in classroom activities, and do those determinants differ by gender? Participation in this context is not a vague aspiration but a measurable behaviour. It covers the frequency with which students answer questions, contribute to discussions, take part in group work and engage with the practical activities that teachers build into their lessons. Decades of international research have linked such engagement to achievement, retention and eventual transitions into further education and employment, making the classroom voice of individual students a surprisingly consequential variable.

To capture it, the researchers employed a cross-sectional descriptive survey design, a standard tool for taking a snapshot of a population at a single point in time. Working within public day secondary schools, schools that students attend during the day while living at home, they sampled 320 Form Three students, typically the penultimate year of Kenyan secondary education. The sampling strategy was both multistage and proportionate, meaning schools were selected in successive stages and the number of students drawn from each school reflected its share of the total enrolment. This design reduces the risk that a single large or atypical school would dominate the results. Data collection relied on structured questionnaires administered with the help of class teachers, and the study proceeded with ethical clearance from the Chuka University Ethics Committee, a research permit from the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation, and authorisation from the County Director of Education for Machakos County.

The analytical centrepiece of the study is a Poisson regression model, a statistical technique chosen because the outcome of interest, counts of participation, is a non-negative integer rather than a continuous measure. Where ordinary linear regression assumes a normally distributed dependent variable, Poisson regression models count data directly, estimating how each explanatory factor changes the expected rate of participation. The researchers screened their candidate predictors for multicollinearity before inclusion, a standard safeguard against the distorted estimates that arise when explanatory variables overlap too heavily. The model was estimated separately for girls and boys, an approach that allowed the team to test not just whether participation levels differed by gender, but whether the underlying economic machinery of participation itself worked differently for each group.

The headline result is that it does. For girls, the strongest and most counterintuitive finding concerned parents’ disposable income: rather than boosting participation, higher disposable income was significantly associated with reduced participation in classroom activities. All other variables in the girls’ model, including the cost of education and family structure, showed no statistically significant effects. For boys, the picture looked markedly different. The cost of education emerged as a significant brake, with rising educational costs reducing the likelihood of participation, while two factors pushed in the opposite direction: students’ expectations of future employment and the number of siblings in the household both significantly increased boys’ participation. The remaining variables in the boys’ model, including parents’ disposable income, showed no significant influence. These gendered patterns held even as overall participation levels themselves also differed between girls and boys.

The counterintuitive income effect for girls invites careful interpretation. In low-resource households, disposable income may flow toward priorities that compete with girls’ schoolwork, or it may correlate with household arrangements in which daughters shoulder more domestic labour regardless of financial comfort. It is also possible that the relationship reflects how income interacts with expectations: families with more resources may channel girls toward different futures, or simply express their support in ways that do not translate into classroom assertiveness. The authors are careful not to overclaim a mechanism, but the practical implication is clear. Financial capacity alone does not guarantee that girls will find their voice in class, and programmes that hand money to households without attending to gender norms inside them may leave the participation gap intact.

The findings for boys are more intuitively legible. When school feels expensive, participation falls, consistent with a long body of evidence showing that educational costs, even in nominally free systems, filter down into engagement as families weigh marginal spending against competing needs. Kenya’s system of day secondary schools nominally benefits from public subsidies, yet levies, materials, uniforms and transport continue to strain household budgets in semi-arid districts like Mwala. The positive effect of sibling count on boys’ participation is intriguing and may reflect peer-like dynamics at home, shared study habits, or the confidence that comes from growing up in a crowded, verbally competitive household. Meanwhile, boys who expect employment after school participate more, exactly as human capital theory would predict: when education is perceived as an investment with a payoff, students invest effort in it.

That theoretical framing runs throughout the paper. The authors situate their work in the human capital tradition that views education as an investment whose returns justify present costs, and in expectancy-value accounts of motivation, which hold that students engage when they both value the outcome and expect to succeed in attaining it. Previous studies, from active-learning classrooms in higher education to analyses of gendered participation in online discussions, have documented persistent gender gaps in who speaks and how often, typically attributing them to classroom demography, confidence and social roles. What this study adds is an economic layer grounded in one of the contexts where those gaps matter most: resource-constrained rural secondary schools where household poverty, family size and labour expectations press directly on adolescent learners.

The policy implications the authors draw are correspondingly targeted. They call for gender-responsive interventions rather than blanket programmes, arguing that what lifts boys’ engagement, such as reducing the visible costs of schooling, may not address the specific barriers facing girls, and vice versa. They point toward strengthened school-based support systems, including guidance and counselling structures that can help students connect classroom effort to credible career pathways, and they urge that career guidance be enhanced so that employment expectations, which appear to energise participation, are realistic and widely shared across genders. For policymakers in Kenya’s Ministry of Education and for the international organisations tracking progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal on quality education, the study offers granular evidence that engagement, not merely enrolment, is where gender inequality now does much of its damage.

The research also speaks to a broader shift in education economics across the developing world. With primary and secondary enrolment having expanded dramatically across East Africa in recent decades, attention has moved from getting children into school to measuring what happens once they are there. Studies of this kind, which treat participation as a countable, modelable behaviour with identifiable economic determinants, are part of a growing toolkit for that task. The authors acknowledge the limits of a cross-sectional design, which captures association rather than proven causation and reflects a single sub-county at a single moment. Data will be made available on request, and the team is transparent that self-reported participation carries its own measurement challenges. Yet within those limits, the message is striking and portable well beyond Mwala: the same classroom contains students whose willingness to engage is being pulled by different economic strings, and any serious effort to close gender gaps in learning must read those strings separately, one group of learners at a time.

The study’s setting matters for interpreting its results. Mwala Sub-County lies in a semi-arid agroecological zone where household incomes depend heavily on rain-fed agriculture, making family finances vulnerable to seasonal shocks that can ripple directly into schooling decisions. Public day secondary schools serve the majority of students in such areas precisely because they allow learners to remain at home, but that arrangement also means classroom engagement is tightly coupled to what happens within the household each evening, from chores to paid work.

Methodologically, the choice to model participation counts separately by gender reflects a growing recognition in education research that pooled samples can mask offsetting effects. A factor that suppresses engagement among girls while boosting it among boys might appear insignificant in a combined model, hiding precisely the dynamics that gender-responsive policy needs to target. The multistage, proportionate sampling of 320 Form Three students strengthens the representativeness of the estimates within the sub-county, though the authors note that self-reported participation and the cross-sectional design limit causal claims.

The emphasis on employment expectations also aligns with expectancy-value frameworks of motivation, which hold that effort follows from believing both that success is possible and that it leads to valued outcomes. In contexts where visible pathways from school to work are unevenly distributed by gender, career guidance becomes not an accessory but a core lever for equitable engagement.

Subject of Research: Gendered socioeconomic determinants of student participation in classroom activities in Kenyan public day secondary schools

Article Title: Gendered determinants of students’ perceived participation in classroom activities: evidence from public day secondary schools in South Eastern Kenya

Article References: Mbithi, A. W., Mbaka, P. K., Mbaka, K. K., & Saoke, V. O. (2026). Gendered determinants of students’ perceived participation in classroom activities: evidence from public day secondary schools in South Eastern Kenya. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 423. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01720-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01720-1

Keywords: gender differences, classroom participation, Poisson regression, cost of education, employment expectations, Kenya, secondary education, socioeconomic status, girls' education, educational equity, human capital, school engagement