The executive branch of government constitutes the pinnacle of political power. In principle, presidents and prime ministers, along with their cabinets, set the policy agenda, debate, and deliberate policy initiatives; introduce legislation; and oversee the implementation of public policies. Executives are the most visible political actors, representing the public “face” of government. Until very recently, executives were also the most masculinized of political institutions, with women absent entirely from the position of prime minister or president until the 1960s, and, at least until the last decade, holding only a small number of posts in cabinet. Yet one of the most striking global trends in recent years is the growing number of women elected to the post of prime minister or president: at the time of writing there are 12 countries where a woman occupies the top political office. A growing number of women are also being appointed cabinet ministers and, in some cases, to some of the most traditionally masculine posts. It is common today to define “parity” cabinets as those where women hold between 40% and 60% of ministerial portfolios. With that definition, countries as different as Spain, Bolivia, Sweden, and South Africa have had gender parity in cabinet. What is more, women's presence in cabinet is now a firmly established norm. Among the first questions raised by commentators after a newly elected president or prime minister announces her cabinet are, how many women were appointed? To which portfolios were they assigned?

Ministerial office represents the pinnacle of political power. Quite rightly, politics and gender and comparative scholarship is paying increasing attention to women's access to political executives (Claveria 2014; Davis 1997; Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2005; Krook and O'Brien 2012; Reynolds 1999; Siaroff 2000; Whitford, Wilkins, and Ball 2007). These studies develop and test a range of hypotheses relating to the demographic, socioeconomic, political cultural, or political institutional factors at state or system level deemed to shape women's access to political executive office. The conclusions primarily emphasize relatively general correlations between women's ministerial representation and a nation's familiarity with women in positions of power (Reynolds 1999), the prevalence of “egalitarian societies” and “leftist values” (Siaroff 2000), or international pressure and regional contagion (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2005). Studies that address the importance of political institutional factors affecting the supply and demand of female government ministers highlight the different procedures for appointing ministers in presidential versus parliamentary democracies (Reynolds 1999; Whitford, Wilkins, and Ball 2007) or the generalist versus specialist recruitment traditions of ministerial recruitment in parliamentary democracies (Claveria 2014; Davis 1997; Siaroff 2000). All studies flag the significance of the numerical presence of women in parliament, and some, the way the electoral system or gender quotas influence women's access to parliament (Claveria 2014; Krook and O'Brien 2012).

Presidents and prime ministers possess vast powers of appointment. These powers can be used to appoint cabinets with an equal number of male and female ministers. Parity cabinets make dramatic statements about gender, representation, and political power. They imply that gender balance—rather than just adding some women—is needed to overcome women's political marginalization. Cabinets with just a few token women are insufficient and undemocratic. Yet appointing women in the same proportions as men challenges a status quo in which men occupy most of the positions of power. Even when leaders possess the formal authority to appoint ministers, forming a parity cabinet means that some existing practices and norms, particularly the norm of male dominance, have been broken. Parity cabinets thus create the possibility of backlash from those who fear reduced opportunities for men to access powerful posts.

The process of selecting cabinet ministers often takes place behind closed doors, including weighing the need to balance or manage factions within the president's party and/or coalition partners; addressing demands for diversity in the cabinet, such as appointment of women or other historically underrepresented groups; sending signals about the administration's policy agenda; and enabling the president to have people he or she trusts close at hand. On the other hand, ministerial exits are usually less private affairs. In some cases they come after weeks of public or congressional scrutiny and criticism of ministers for policy failures or follow extended speculation about who will lose their seat when the president reshuffles the cabinet. Some ministers depart to pursue lucrative private-sector opportunities. Other ministers switch posts but stay in government. How ministers exit can have implications for the administration since a president who is frequently forced to shuffle the cabinet or sack ministers looks ineffective, and comparisons to rats and sinking ships are difficult to avoid in the wake of excessive changes. At the same time, an administration with zero turnover may also not be healthy, as it would suggest that presidents are staidly bound to their initial course of action and unable (or unwilling) to adapt to changing circumstances.

In October 2012 the Danish Socialist People's Party chose Annette Vilhelmsen as its leader. With her ascension to power, women simultaneously headed all three of Denmark's governing parties for the first time. Though an exclusively female-led coalition government remains exceptional, in developed democracies the number of female prime ministers and party leaders has grown in recent years. Since 2000, women have governed in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia and have commanded coalition partner parties in Austria, Ireland, and Sweden. Just as there are now more female leaders, governments are also nominating more women to cabinets than ever before. Women recently held half of all ministerial posts in Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Spain. Female ministers are also serving in high-prestige portfolios from which they were traditionally excluded, including finance and foreign affairs.

Given that most national executives have been men, it is a commonplace to observe that access to executive power is gendered. Men have historically served as heads of government, and few women have been presidents or prime ministers. Women's numbers are increasing, however, as is research focusing on women who have achieved national executive leadership (e.g., Jalalzai 2013; Murray 2010). Such research has emphasized women's individual resources and credentials, family background, and political experience as factors contributing to their political success; research focusing on the strategic and institutional structural factors that contribute to this success has been rare.

Twenty years ago, Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski published the classic work Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament (1995), one of the most comprehensive accounts of legislative recruitment thus far. Seeking to explain the social bias evident in legislatures worldwide, Norris and Lovenduski focused on the central role of political parties, arguing that the outcome of parties’ selection processes could be understood in terms of the interaction between the supply of candidates wishing to stand for office and the demands of party gatekeepers who select the candidates. Indeed, in most countries, political parties control not only which candidates are recruited and selected, but also are the central actors involved in adopting and implementing candidate selection reforms such as gender quotas. Yet, two decades later, systematic studies of the “secret garden” of candidate selection and recruitment have been few and far between in the gender and politics literature. It therefore seems a particularly appropriate time to revisit the core preoccupations, puzzles, and challenges that remain in the field of gender and political recruitment.

Candidate selection and recruitment has been notably described as the “secret garden” of politics—an obscure process, often hidden from view, that is regulated largely by internal party rules, informal practices, and power relationships (cf. Gallagher and Marsh 1988). In this contribution, we contend that informal party practices and their gendered consequences are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female underrepresentation. Rather than make a strict separation between formal and informal rules in the recruitment process, we argue that gender politics scholars must instead identify and empirically investigate the specific combinations of such rules that impact upon women's and men's political participation in parties. The proposed approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the bounded nature and variable outcomes of institutional innovation and party change.

Is women's chronic minority status worldwide explained by a lack of women wishing to stand for political office or by party selectors’ disinterest in selecting women candidates? This debate continues among gender politics scholars; however, an increasing number of studies highlight the need to further investigate how the demands of party selectors might shape the supply of women candidates, especially in strong parliamentary democracies where political parties are the key gatekeepers (Kenny 2013; Murray 2010). This concern was already present in Norris and Lovenduski's (1995) original model, which called for a deeper examination of the “interaction effects” between “supply” and “demand.” In engaging with this call, I argue that the constraining effects of supply are reinforced not only by the demands of party selectors, but also by the everyday (gendered) functioning of political parties, which helps us understand the differential chances of women and men eventually becoming candidates.

Invite a woman to run for office. Based on findings that women are most responsive to and reliant on encouragement in making the decision to run for office, this invitation refrain is pervasive among those seeking greater gender parity in U.S. politics. For example, in 2007, the Women's Campaign Fund launched She Should Run, complete with an online tool that, to date, has been used to ask just under 200,000 women to run for office. In 2014, another organization, Vote Run Lead, adopted a similar strategy, launching Invitation Nation to send e-invitations to run to nearly 10,000 women within their first year of launching the project. My own organization, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), has “invited” countless women to run for office through online communications, training programs, and recruitment campaigns and initiatives. While each of these organizations has also sought to provide potential women candidates with training, information, and resources to assist them throughout the recruitment process, our obsession with inviting can constrain a more complex and comprehensive approach to female candidate recruitment in both research and practice.

Feminist scholars have developed a solid research agenda on gender equality in politics. This scholarship is built on the conviction that equitable representation of men and women is fundamental to the functioning of representative democracies (Mansbridge 1999; Norris and Lovenduski 1995). In order to comply with the intersectional research paradigm, gender and politics scholars have increasingly focused on other discriminatory mechanisms and how these relate to gender. Marginalized or privileged positions based on gender, ethnicity, race, class, or age are conceived not as “swinging free” from each other, but as interacting (Hancock 2007). Consequently, a group can be privileged in one context but disadvantaged in another depending on historical structures and contexts. Such an intersectional approach raises new questions about the meaning of political equality (Mügge 2013; Mügge and De Jong 2013). For instance, to what extent is women's sheer numerical presence an indicator for political equality if that presence is a marker of inclusion as well as exclusion? This contribution focuses on political recruitment and the question of whether inclusion fosters equality. Drawing on our ongoing research on Belgium and the Netherlands, we argue that an intersectional analysis of recruitment is indispensable to capture the nature of inclusion and exclusion and therefore to the understanding of political equality.

Certain societal groups are significantly overrepresented within politics, including men, ethnic majority groups, and socioeconomic elites. This has fueled debates regarding meritocracy within political recruitment. While meritocracy is desirable, its definition and measurement are contested. The criteria used in theoretical and empirical academic studies differ from those of political parties and voters, as discussed below. Furthermore, there is bias in favor of the male status quo, with all groups preferring the qualities of existing elites. The definition of a “good” politician is therefore highly subjective. Nonetheless, political traditionalists claim that the “best” candidate should be selected even if this leads to significant gender imbalance in parliaments. Yet, if political recruitment is biased in favor of social elites, the overrecruitment of men may not derive solely from merit (Murray 2014). Without definitive criteria for evaluating prospective candidates and judging those already elected, we cannot determine whether political recruitment is meritocratic.