Scholars of gender and politics have long discussed the various manifestations of the “double-bind” for women who seek political leadership. Using a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample, this article examines whether this double-bind exists for female judges. The study reveals that while gender stereotypes are not uniformly applied to female judges, women on the bench are assessed differently in terms of their empathy and knowledge under certain circumstances. The article then discusses the potential implications of these gendered assessments for perceptions of the court, its actions, and women who aspire to judicial roles.

How did the interplay of intellectual overconfidence, gender, and professional socialization limit economic policy debate over the subprime boom and global financial crisis? In this article, I integrate historical institutionalist and feminist institutionalist insights to make sense of the interplay of gender and professional socialization in limiting the scope for precrisis regulation and postcrisis reform. First, drawing on historical institutionalist perspectives, I highlight the scope for inefficiency in the use of information, arguing that policy success over time can engender tendencies to misplace confidence and intellectual closure. Secondly, drawing on feminist institutionalist perspectives, I stress the role of professional and gender socialization in enabling agents to resist such inefficiencies and so limit the scope for intellectual closure. In empirical terms, I then advance three case studies addressing the roles of Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Sheila Bair, and Troubled Asset Relief Program Congressional Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren in challenging the precrisis deregulatory consensus. In the conclusion, I address theoretical and policy implications, stressing the social dynamics that may spur women toward increased professional and intellectual risk taking.

Former Australian Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard was accused of unfairly playing the gender card against then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in her accusations of sexism and misogyny. It was also claimed that she had thereby initiated the first “gender war” in Australian politics. Analyzing Australian politicians’ discursive mobilizations of gender during the Gillard period provides useful insights that are relevant to the broader international literature on gender and politics, particularly given that Gillard's experiences have similarities with those of prominent female politicians in other countries, including Hillary Clinton. The article argues for a much broader understanding of playing the gender card that includes both issues of femininity and masculinity and that also emphasizes the close relationship between issues of playing the gender card and issues of gender performativity.

Anecdotally, it is assumed that the factors that constrain women from entering parliament spill over into the way they experience holding public office, thus limiting their influence. Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews and other publically available materials we test this supposition by investigating the experiences of women who have served in parliament in the Pacific Islands, a region famous for its low levels of women's representation. We ask if and how women see their gender as influencing their parliamentary roles. We identify two narratives. The first aligns with the orthodox assumption where prevailing patriarchal norms stymie the influence of women MPs. The second, however, is a counternarrative that defies the conventional reading and instead posits that gender matters little once inside parliament with MPs, highlighting the importance of other identities—family, community, religious, etc.—to their constituent representation and reelection campaigns. In turn, women MPs who hold to this latter perspective are often critical of what they see as the imposition of gender norms by foreign donors. Employing the concept intersectionality allows us to simultaneously acknowledge and problematize this duality, thus providing a more nuanced reading of the impact of gender on parliamentary life in the Pacific region.

In this paper, we study the ways in which affirmative action for one political minority, gender quotas, impact on intersectional representation. In a quantitative analysis of detailed panel data from 285 Swedish municipal assemblies, the numerical impact of a zipper placement mandate in Sweden's largest political party, the Social Democratic Party, is analyzed. No evidence that this quota helped, or hindered, the intersectional representation of men or women is found in the short run, but it is found that a weak numerical impact may exist in the long run. A qualitative analysis of party records and interviews with key actors sheds further light on these results. Differences in the norms of representation for women and polyethnic minorities, coupled with weak organizational and practical constraints for formulating policies for the latter, appear to be likely explanations.

I offer a reading Sara Ruddick's account of feminist solidarity as grounded in her reconceptualization of “work” in order to suggest that she provides a framework for transnational feminist solidarity that offers an important augmentation to other contemporary theories of transnational feminist solidarity. Feminist solidarity, according to Ruddick, forms through struggles to work. But what she means by work has not been fully appreciated in the literature on Ruddick. Scholars who focus solely on maternal thinking or even the work of mothering obscure the fact that such work is just her prime example of the reconceptualized notion of work she develops. I unpack her notion of work and show how it functions in a theoretical account of transnational feminist solidarity and feminist resistance movements.

The essays here reflect on the need to rebuild bridges between two key strands of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist (international) political economy (FPE/FIPE). As many of the contributions to this section point out, feminist IR scholarship has long emphasized how gender relations and identities are constituted globally in relation to processes of militarization, securitization, globalization, and governance. In more recent years, however, feminist IR scholarship has come to be dominated by a concern with security (Prügl 2011). Of course, FPE scholarship has continued to provide critical accounts of the gendered nature of global production, work, and financial crises (among other issues). But it is notable that, in doing so, much FPE scholarship has tended to avoid questions of security and/or violence. This CP section, then, looks to the growing divide between FSS and FPE with all of the contributors seeking to analyse how these two traditions of feminist scholarship might be reintegrated and why this reintegration is important.

In Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, J. Ann Tickner (1992) identified three main dimensions to “achieving global security”—national security, economic security, and ecological security: conflict, economics, and the environment. Much of the work in feminist peace studies that inspired early feminist International Relations (IR) work (e.g., Brock-Utne 1989; Reardon 1985) and many of Tickner's contemporaries (e.g., Enloe 1989; Peterson and Runyan 1991; Pettman 1996) also saw political economy and a feminist conception of security as intrinsically interlinked. Yet, as feminist IR research evolved in the early 21st century, more scholars were thinking either about political economy or about war and political violence, but not both.

While feminists usually try to ground the meanings that they study, theorizing the mundane or the everyday may very well represent a detour—or even a dead end—if bread-and-butter issues related to the security and economic well-being of ordinary women and men are ignored. What value does feminist theorizing (even if it draws from women's lived experiences) have in war-affected contexts where meeting immediate needs is paramount? At what point does the theorizing of the body under such circumstances become a means to satisfying intellectual fetishes? Theorizing the everyday is messy because it has to contend with the immediate social setting in which popular culture is inseparable from the economic materiality of the conditions of oppression.

A photo depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin in chivalrous fashion, placing his coat around the shoulders of China's first lady at an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) dinner made headline news around the world in November 2014 (Allen-Ebrahimian 2014). Surely this is not the serious stuff of international politics, IR colleagues commented in social media forums? But from a feminist perspective that pays attention to the pervasive gendering of IR, the image was not at all surprising or trivial. Indeed, the gender symbolism of the image reveals the patriarchal foundations of international politics. Putin, for his part, personifies the linkages between the figure of the male provider—at the heart of global economic governance and meetings like APEC—and the figure of the male protector of “womenandchildren” (Enloe 1993)—at the heart of the security state system.

This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies (FSS).

In reflecting upon the divergence of Feminist Political Economy (FPE) and Feminist Security Studies (FSS) one feels puzzled and perhaps even a little embarrassed. How could such a schism occur and be sustained for seemingly so long? This divergence certainly did not appear to characterize the founding of feminist International Relations (IR) when scholars such as Cynthia Enloe (1983, 1989) and Ann Tickner (1992) were attentive to both dimensions and carefully connected issues of gender to the global economy and to understandings of security and militarism. Moreover, to my mind, there is no immediate epistemological or ontological schism between FSS and FPE of the sort that has characterized other feminist divides. The security studies/International Political Economy (IPE) split seems to be more one of empirical focus that does not require a painstaking and perhaps ultimately futile attempt to suture the feminist IR body back together. Indeed, recent and highly illuminating work on the connections between gender violence and global and local political economies (Meger 2014; True 2012a) would suggest no reason why we should not simply press ahead with the task of reconnection and driving feminist IR forward to new and insightful places.

A rural poor woman wants to withdraw from the microcredit scheme, but her husband slaps her when she even suggests not renewing her loan.