Since its launch in 2005, Politics & Gender has been a leading outlet for research on women, gender, and politics in both the United States and globally. This special issue marks the journal’s 20th anniversary with a collection of essays dedicated to Politics & Gender and its impact on political science. In a public call for papers circulated last year, the editors solicited submissions on questions like: How has Politics & Gender shaped and contributed to debates in the discipline, informing knowledge on certain topics or setting new research agendas? How has research on women, gender, and politics evolved over the last 20 years, as viewed through the lens of publications and topics appearing in Politics & Gender? What role has Politics & Gender played in your career, for example, in terms of inspiring lines of research, finding collaborators, or gaining a profile in the field? What are new topics and approaches that should be taken up in Politics & Gender in the coming years?

Scholars who responded to this call include scholars from a variety of institutions at all stages of their careers, from graduate students to junior researchers to distinguished senior academics. Reading and editing the contributions has offered me a privileged view into what Politics & Gender has meant to others and to the discipline as a whole. It has also given me an opportunity to reflect on the impact of the journal, both personally and professionally, on my own career. I was a graduate student attending my first ever American Political Science Association (APSA) meeting in 2003 when I first learned about the journal. That year, the APSA Women and Politics Section (now the Women, Gender, and Politics Section) decided to launch Politics & Gender as its official journal, after many years of being informally associated with Women & Politics (now the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, or JWPP).

One of my most vivid memories from the 2003 section business meeting was Pippa Norris explaining why the journal would be named Politics & Gender and not Gender & Politics. This was because the committee wanted to highlight that the journal’s aim was to bring gender into political science, rather than political science into gender studies (see also Baldez and Beckwith Reference Baldez and Beckwith2025). This linguistic ordering has filtered into other spaces, as seen in the name of the European Conference on Politics and Gender and its journal, the European Journal of Politics and Gender (EJPG). Over the last two decades, it has been exciting to witness the growth of the research community as the number of journals devoted to these topics has expanded from two, Women & Politics (started in 1980) and the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP), to five currently: Politics & Gender, alongside IFJP (1999–), JWPP (2005–), Politics, Groups, and Identities (2013–), and EJPG (2018–).

Politics & Gender has subsequently played a central role in my career over the last twenty years. I have served on the editorial board (2007–10), as an associate editor (2010–13), and as lead editor (2022–25). I have written pieces in all formats, including research articles (Celis et al. Reference Celis, Childs, Kantola and Krook2014; Krook Reference Krook2006b), Critical Perspectives essays (Childs and Krook Reference Childs and Krook2006; Driscoll and Krook Reference Driscoll and Krook2009; Franceschet, Krook, and Wolbrecht Reference Franceschet, Krook and Wolbrecht2023; Krook Reference Krook2006a; Krook Reference Krook2011; Krook Reference Krook2018; Krook and Messing-Mathie Reference Krook and Messing-Mathie2013), book reviews (Krook Reference Krook and Opello2007), and Notes from the Field (Krook Reference Krook2023; Pepera and Krook Reference Pepera and Krook2023). I am deeply grateful that the journal gave me a place to publish some of my earliest work on gender quotas, women’s substantive representation, and violence against women in politics. But, like Farida Jalalzai (Reference Jalalzai2025), I also view Politics & Gender as “more than a journal.” It has helped me find, as well as cultivate, a broader scholarly community. My favorite part has been contributing to the various Critical Perspectives sections, where authors come together to highlight and forge new research directions — reflecting a collective, feminist ethos that has been, in my view, central to inspiring important advances in the field.

The essays in this special issue offer a similar mix of personal and professional reflections. The first four articles review research published in Politics & Gender in its first two decades, taking stock of what the journal has meant for gender and politics research, as well as for political science more broadly. In “What Does Politics & Gender Publish? Trends, Methods, and Topics in Gender and Politics Research,” Carolyn Barnett, Michael FitzGerald, Katie Krumbholz, and Manika Lamba (Reference Barnett, FitzGerald, Krumbholz and Lamba2025) analyze metadata to show that the growing volume of work published in the journal has become more quantitative over time and has focused mainly on substantive questions related to women running for office and dynamics of women’s political representation. In “From Inclusion to Transformation: Politics & Gender as a Critical Actor for Intersectional Political Science,” Ashlee Christoffersen and Orly Siow (Reference Christoffersen and Siow2025) explore how articles published in the journal have developed and applied the concept of intersectionality over time. They argue that, while the journal has been critical in bringing this focus into the discipline, there is further work to be done to operationalize intersectionality in line with Black feminist theory and to center women of color and other intersectionally marginalized groups in political science.

In “A Look Back At 20 Years of Research on Gender and Voting in Politics & Gender,” Erin C. Cassese and Amanda Friesen (Reference Cassese and Friesen2025) argue that articles published in the journal have helped the discipline better understand how gender shapes the preferences, behavior, and motivations of voters. They identify four major themes of this research: descriptive representation and elections, sources of heterogeneity among women voters, gender differences in information processing, and gender bias in elections. In “The Growth of a Field: Politics & Gender and Research on Gender Quotas,” I analyze the role of the journal in the literature on gender quotas, examining publication patterns over time as well as identifying publications that have been particularly influential. I also show how this work has advanced knowledge in comparative politics and international relations related to candidate selection, electoral reform, political careers, policymaking processes, and stereotypes and public opinion (Krook Reference Krook2025).

The next seven articles take the form of Notes from the Field, a new article type introduced in 2022 to provide a venue for work on crossing the theory-practice divide. The first three essays, authored by former editors of Politics & Gender, reflect on their own experiences at the helm and what they view as the major achievements of the journal in its first twenty years. In “Bridging Attribute and Process: Reflections on Founding Politics & Gender,” Lisa Baldez and Karen Beckwith (Reference Baldez and Beckwith2025) explain how the journal came to be established and how they conceived of its aims from the perspective of political science and gender studies. They argue that political scientists have tended to conceptualize gender in two ways, as an individual attribute and as a feature of institutions, and they call on scholars to be explicit and intentional about how they use gender in their research.

In “The Changing Subfield of Comparative Politics and the Journal of Politics & Gender,” Aili Mari Tripp (Reference Tripp2025) considers how the journal has provided a platform for comparative literature on gender and politics, expanding the remit of gender research beyond American politics and influencing the study of comparative politics as a subfield. Citing articles published in the journal, she identifies evolving and emerging areas of research that have deepened our knowledge — and led us to ask new questions — about gendered political dynamics. In “Our Editorial Experience at Politics & Gender, 2016–19,” Mary Caputi, Sun Young Kwak, Steven Gonzales, and Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Caputi, Kwak, Gonzales and Kaufman-Osborn2025) discuss how themes taken up during their editorial tenure remain as relevant as ever, demonstrating the timeliness as well as strong need for dedicated feminist scholarship in the face of a political climate that is increasingly hostile to feminism.

The next two contributions, by senior scholars, consider how Politics & Gender has helped build a broader research community, with tangible impacts on political science as a whole. In “Feminist Institution Building: Political Science and Politics & Gender,” Marian Sawer (Reference Sawer2025) reflects on progress in building an epistemic community of gender and politics scholars since the 1970s. She argues that, while institutional spaces for feminist political science have proliferated, the field has remained largely faithful to disciplinary norms, on the one hand, but has transformed the practice of politics and policy, on the other. In “More Than a Journal: Politics & Gender and the Study of Women as National Leaders,” Farida Jalalzai (Reference Jalalzai2025) contemplates the role of Politics & Gender in establishing a new area of research on women presidents and prime ministers. She credits the journal, and its community, for sustaining her focus — in the face of resistance — on the importance of studying gender and politics.

The final two essays look to the future of the journal. In “Advice for Junior Scholars from the Politics & Gender Writing Workshop,” Majka Hahn (Reference Hahn2025), the journal’s graduate assistant, offers key takeaways from the 2024 APSA Pre-Conference Workshop organized by the Politics & Gender editorial team. These include finding your interlocutors, the academic conversations you would like to contribute to as a scholar; having a real engagement with gender, going beyond “add women and stir” approaches; and considering the positionality and political context of your research, reflecting on how the underlying politics of a project affect how it is taken up in political science. In “Gender Matters (Even More): Reflections on the Future of Politics & Gender,” Sara Angevine (Reference Angevine2025) points to remaining gaps in our knowledge despite the impressive growth of gender and politics scholarship over the last 20 years. In her view, three areas in need of further critical investigation include feminist political theory, sexuality and politics, and gender and international relations. In a pithy summary of where the field is headed, she astutely observes that gender not only matters to the study of politics, but in the present context, it matters even more.