In 1997, an unprecedented number of female MPs—120—were elected to the UK House of Commons, doubling the numbers of female representatives overnight. Of these, 101 came from a single party: Labour. They entered a political institution that had hitherto been massively male-dominated (even in 1997, their number counted less than 20%) and famed for its historic traditions dominated by masculinized structures and norms (Lovenduski 2005; 2010). Many of the newly elected Labour women were known to each other, having already shared experiences of passing through their party's internal selection processes over the preceding years. Many broadly shared the same views of what the Labour party should stand for, ideologically speaking, and most were attitudinally feminist (Childs 2004). The mass media at the time of the general election, and thereafter, routinely constituted them as a collective entity—Blair's Babes—and the specifically right-wing media regularly subjected them to highly gendered criticism (Childs 2008, 140–165).

What does a political commitment to gender equality mean in the context of fatherhood? In what ways should the state support or compel fathers so as to affect greater gender equality? If there is any consensus on these questions in the gender literature, then it is that existing family leave policy—even the most progressive—has fallen short of a satisfactory answer. Typically, this failure is understood either in economic terms—that policy provision is simply inadequate in scale—or in terms of individual preferences that should be encouraged to change. Indeed, both of these approaches intend to incentivize men to take up more caring duties, a theme that has become central to the politics of gender equality (Gornick and Meyers 2008; Haas and Rostgaard 2011; Hobson 2002; Kamerman and Moss 2009).

Half a decade into a new global economic crisis, most policymakers, pundits, and scholars discuss the situation in nongendered ways, carting out long-standing criticisms of bloated states or of neoliberalism, despite powerful feminist critiques. At the same time, feminist scholars, particularly those within feminist political science (FPS) studying advanced democracies, have been struggling with a “central paradox . … The widespread formal adoption and development of … gender equality … initiatives … [but] their partial and variable institutionalization in terms of impact on institutional practices, norms, and outcomes” (Mackay, Monro, and Waylen 2009, 254–55). In this article, we make a case for a feminist theory of political corruption that can help explain both the economic crisis and this paradox of “strong equality policy, weak practice.”

By definition, gender mainstreaming is the process by which a gendered perspective (male and female) is integrated into the fabric of our communities, institutions, and lives (United Nations 1997). We live in a society defined by our values of equality, social justice, and opportunity. In order for these values to permeate into our everyday lives, we must address issues of “separateness” that still seem to prevail in our institutions, particularly in our political science curricula. Di Stefano (1997, 204) presented gender as “a socially constructed and politically enforced notion of what it means to be male or female” and argues that this gendered lens is “political because it has the power to impose meaning and value to our activities and social relationships.” Mainstreaming is a transition from a male-defined curriculum to a more gender-balanced curriculum that better reflects the improved status of women in society.

Gender mainstreaming is a curricular reform emphasizing the inclusion of gendered perspectives into required coursework for the political science major. The burden of mainstreaming gendered content (along with other diversity subjects) ultimately lies with the instructor, who must provide a rigorous, comprehensive, and intellectually challenging course. To the extent that instructors rely on textbooks to structure (and even streamline) course development, the textbook is an important entry point for exploring the prevalence of gender content in the political science curriculum. Given the symbolic status of textbooks as “repositories of official knowledge” for the discipline (Ferree and Hall 1996), the exploration of content on women in introductory-level American politics textbooks offers insight into the messages students commonly receive about the role of women in American political life.

In her piece on experiential learning in a Gender and Politics course, Cynthia Daniels (1997) discusses the ways students' democratic ideals are expanded and enforced through work outside the classroom. She describes the intersection of the classroom with service-learning activities as a way to tackle questions such as, how does gender equity require us to rethink the distinction between public and private life, and what might be the risks of using state power to regulate private relations of power in the home and the workplace (120)? Accomplishing gender mainstreaming through experiential learning serves the purpose of reemphasizing different group perspectives in all types of student learning while demonstrating the “uniqueness” of the effects of policy on women.

Although the presence of women in the political science profession has increased rapidly since the 1980s, women still constitute less than 30% of the political science faculty nationwide and are more likely to find themselves in lower-paying and/or nontenure track positions (APSA 2011, 39; Evans and Moulder 2011). In the discipline, the position of gender and politics as a legitimate course of study has improved markedly since the 1970s (Lovenduski 1998; Mackay 2004; Murphy 2010; Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll 2006). As Childs and Krook (2006, 19) point out, “mainstream editors, publishers and conference conveners no longer feel able to ignore the work of feminist political scientists.” But they also present evidence that this improvement stops short of full incorporation into the discipline and note that there is still skepticism about the value of feminist scholarship. This skepticism is also present at the intersection of the profession and discipline: while there are no systematic data on the employment of gender and politics scholars, it is not rare for a gender and politics scholar to be told that her employment prospects would be better if she were to research something else (Childs and Krook 2006). Given the position of women in the profession and the status of gender and politics in the discipline, it is unsurprising that there is continued resistance to integrating gender into mainstream political science education (Baldez 2010; Lovenduski 2005; Murphy 2010).

At a time when both the value of gender mainstreaming as well as of higher education itself is being debated, this collection of essays on gender mainstreaming in the discipline of political science is an important rejoinder regarding the necessity of both. First, implicit in these essays is a reminder that the value of a college education resides as much in its contribution to the maintenance of democratic life in the United States as it does in the possibility of earning a good salary. Indeed, entwined with the advocacy of gender mainstreaming in the discipline of political science is a belief that the discipline itself contributes to the development of empowered democratic citizens and the cultivation of a robust political culture. The study and teaching of politics is part of how we learn to participate in political life: political science is a form of civic education. Including women—all women as well as all men—in the curriculum of political science ensures the vitality of our democracy. Further, including women in the discipline both as faculty and as students ensures that the agenda of the discipline itself will be transformed. After a decade of gender mainstreaming, the goal remains not only to ensure that women become part of the mainstream, but also that they transform the mainstream.