This study investigates the subjective effects of gender quotas by examining how quotas affect party elites’ perceptions of quota beneficiaries. Furthermore, it proposes to distinguish between objective and subjective quota effects. Subjective effects were studied by randomizing information on whether politicians got into office through a gender quota. Elites then were asked to rate politicians based on an audio clip and an experimental vignette. Whereas the two treatment groups were told that gender quotas or ceiling quotas for men were employed during a politician’s election, the control group did not receive this information. This experiment was conducted in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. More than 1,000 party elites participated overall. Contrary to expectations, being framed as a “quota woman” only has a negative impact among elites of the radical right. In contrast with the center right, the radical right is opposed not only to quotas but to quota beneficiaries as well.

The intraparty mechanisms through which parties recruit, motivate, and select their candidates are central explanatory factors for the representation of women. This article analyzes the effects of intraparty factors on women's representation by measuring the impact of (1) parties’ non-quota strategies at the regional level—such as establishing women's sections, mentoring programs, or campaign funding for women—and (2) central party gatekeepers at the local level. Exploiting an original, newly compiled data set consisting of 1,475 electoral lists from the 2014 local council elections in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, this article shows that parties’ non-quota strategies and central gatekeepers play crucial roles in determining the share of women on local party tickets. This means that who runs for office is, in this case, a question of intraparty dynamics. These dynamics are caused by different mechanisms of non-quota strategies and gender-biased candidate selection combined with interparty effects of local party competition and left-party strength. The almost consistent conditions that the subnational level provides show that the parties’ capacities (or lack thereof) for gendered recruitment is one major explanatory factor and should be tested at least in cross-national comparisons.

“The word I would use to describe my position on the bench is lonely.” So said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2007, when asked to comment on her position on the U.S. Supreme Court after the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. After a year as the Court's only woman, Ginsburg had begun to feel the solitude that comes from judging alone, being the Court's only descriptive and often symbolic representative of women's interests. Ginsburg's position was not, sadly, as rare as we might hope in industrialized democracies. Although some countries, such as Canada, have had near majorities of women on their respective high courts, other countries, such as the United Kingdom, continue to have only one woman on their national tribunals.

Women have unique experiences during natural disasters, including higher risks of death, violence, and socioeconomic decline and an increase in specific reproductive health needs. However, government responses often do not directly address these women-specific needs, which can decrease women’s political trust. I investigate women’s trust in government institutions when natural disasters have recently occurred and argue that because of their unique experiences and typical government responses, women’s political trust will decline when there is a natural disaster more than men’s. I find that when there is a high number of disasters and when a larger percentage of the population is affected by disasters, women’s political trust decreases significantly, especially institutional trust. These findings are distinct from previous studies that cluster different types of political trust and support the idea that women’s experiences in a disaster may influence their relationship with institutions differently than men’s.

While female representation in the top diplomatic circles was almost nonexistent during the Czechoslovak era, the number of female diplomats in the Czech Republic has steadily increased since the fall of the state-socialist regime. Women are currently solidly represented in the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), but very few (14%) reach highest diplomatic positions. This study examines the main challenges that influence the careers of top diplomats using quantitative and qualitative data, including official statistics and documents of the Czech MFA and interviews with top diplomats and officials. The results indicate that work-family conflicts are the main challenge for all diplomats. However, women are apparently affected more disproportionately because of the existing “double burden” and a specific “concept of motherhood” vested in a deeply essentialist understanding of gender roles. These barriers have origins at the personal, institutional, and state levels that are strongly interrelated and historically and politically path dependent.

I heard Durva, a fearless leader in the Indian political party, Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army) repeat this poetic refrain in many of her public speeches. She invariably received rousing applause and breathless admiration from the audiences she addressed. Many junior party workers and female constituents who listened in awe at the large women's rallies she organized around the elections began to repeat this in their own lives and in their political campaigns; and Durva's leadership style and the words uttered by her sharp but poetic and charismatic tongue traveled across the district helping the political careers and the self-confidence of many junior political hopefuls. It also brought hordes of new political constituents into the party's fold. Many of her constituents at these events, admitted me that “[Durva] is the malkin [landlady)] of us all.”

In 2004, 39 individuals were newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Eight of these individuals were women. Women went on to win two special elections held in 2005, while a man won the third contest. This increase in the numerical representation of women in the lower house of Congress in 2004–5 was a positive counter to the lack of progress women made in advancing their numbers in other elective offices, such as the U.S. Senate, governorships, and state legislatures in 2004. These gains in representation, however, only amounted to a 15.5% membership for women in the U.S. House of Representatives. Who were these successful women, and what does their election suggest to us about women and political officeholding and about gender as a factor when men and women run for public office in the early years of the twenty-first century? Do their campaigns and election reflect the continued relevance of gender, or are they indications of the demise of gender as a factor in elections?

In a recent text detailing the alleged wrongs of feminism, conservatives Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly pronounced,

It is no secret that men and women continue to have unequal access in democratic systems. In nearly every country for which data exist, women participate less in politics and hold fewer government positions than men (Beauregard 2014). In recent years, analysis of this ongoing problem has taken an institutional turn: feminist institutionalism examines how the formal and informal “rules of the game” create persistent bias against women in office and the advancement of feminist policy agendas (e.g., Krook and Mackay 2011). Such analysis is important and enlightening, but it illuminates only part of the story. An ongoing problem in most democracies is women's lower level of participation: women are less interested in politics, less likely to be active in campaigning, and less likely to contact officials. While women often vote at the same rate as men, their lower rates of political engagement and higher-intensity forms of participation remains to be explained (Coffe and Bolzendahl 2011; Verba, Burns, and Schlozman 1997).

There is a growing body of work examining gender stereotypes in media representations of female candidates, but much of this literature is based on analysis of media sources in developed countries, including the United States (Braden 1996; Jalalzai 2006; Kahn 1994, 1996; Smith 1997), Australia (Kittilson and Fridkin 2008), Canada (Kittilson and Fridkin 2008), France (Murray 2010b), and Germany (Wiliarty 2010). The increase in female presidential candidates and presidents in Latin America has encouraged research on media portrayals of women in Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela (Franceschet and Thomas 2010; Hinojosa 2010; Piscopo 2010; Thomas and Adams 2010). To date, however, there has been little research exploring media representations of female politicians in Africa. (Exceptions include Adams 2010; Anderson, Diabah, and hMensah 2011). A question that emerges is whether the gender stereotypes common in coverage in the United States, Europe, and Latin America are also prevalent in Africa.

After the publication of What Happened, much attention was directed toward analyzing and commenting on a section of Hillary Rodham Clinton's book that detailed her thinking in a split-second situation during one of the presidential debates with Donald Trump. Clinton explains that during the second debate, which occurred just days after the release of the famous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump “bragged about groping women” (Clinton 2017, 136), Trump was more or less following her around the small stage, “staring at [her], making faces” (136). She notes that it was “incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck” (136). But she also considers her response to Trump's physically threatening demeanor during the debate and whether she responded appropriately or “correctly.” Clinton kept her cool—she kept going in the face of what she describes as a physically menacing situation. She refused to be “rattled” by Trump's proximate presence or by the individuals he invited to sit in the audience to intimidate her.

Jean Elshtain's writings on feminism, families, and politics were both profoundly important to the development of feminist theory and, at times, deeply puzzling. Elshtain engaged with central texts of western political thought in ways that enabled and encouraged others to think through what it would mean to take women's lives seriously in all their ambiguity and complexity.

Widespread adoption of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) represents a puzzle. It cannot be described as serving the interests of any state as understood in conventional theories of international relations because it commits countries to radical social change. Yet all but six UN member states have ratified it. We argue that the case can only be explained by reference to Waltz’ first image, the individual level. We invoke Giddens' notion of structuration to explain how a small group of like-minded women, many of them diplomats, were able to work within existing structures of international diplomacy to create institutions that embedded their ideals in international law. These women were critical actors, positioned simultaneously in activist organizations and government and diplomatic institutions, giving them leverage to institutionalize new norms. The case shows the importance of analysis at the individual level to explain normative change in the international system.

Debates about whether states can act intersectionally have resulted in mostly negative responses (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Koldinská 2009; Lombardo and Verloo 2009; Skjeie and Langvasbråten 2009; Squires 2008). Notably, most of the theorizing on this concern is situated within a European context in which scholars are grappling simultaneously with the questions of whether states can act intersectionally, and what intersectionality itself means within local contexts outside of its U.S. genesis. That is, scholars are asking both whether states can be committed to acting intersectionally and whether and how the theory travels in the first place. Similar concerns are relevant to the Latin American case, where, as is true for Europe, there is some promotion of intersectional action at the level of academic theorizing, state, and civil society, alongside some ambivalence about whether and how the concept is meaningful at the local level. States like Uruguay are open to fostering a more inclusive environment because of the commitment of its own state actors, what might be termed diffuse support at the international level, and the work of local actors who see the need—and some of whom have pushed for—greater insertion. But this openness is accompanied by a lack of clarity around, and ambivalence about, intersectionality even within the context of the state, much less among the organized community. I focus here on said ambivalence and the incomplete elaboration of intersectionality within the National Women's Institute (Inmujeres), which is exemplified by distinct approaches to intersectionality within the Institution, distinct approaches to the question of difference, and a lack of civil society insertion.

The #MeToo movement gained global prominence after Hollywood celebrities came forward with their experiences of sexual violence and encouraged others to do the same. This was by no means the first time a woman had told the world of her experience of sexual violation, but this time, the powerful were paying attention: “Women have been saying these things forever. It is the response to them that has changed” (MacKinnon 2020, 7). High-quality investigative journalists vetted the women's accounts and provided more stories of sexual abuse and predation. Many survivors have since come forward with their own names and their perpetrators’ names, leading some prominent men to be deprived of their fame and positions of power. The #MeToo movement makes two things matter and count: what the victims say and what the perpetrators did. It has raised the perpetrators’ accountability and the victims’ credibility and reversed the scenario of sexual violation: making the perpetrator, not the victim, pay for the sexual harm.

Stereotypical assumptions about minority candidates serving those who identify most closely with their own identity have led to heightened scrutiny of women and Black candidates’ language. Using race-gendered language on the campaign trail can undermine a candidate’s viability, as skepticism of racial and gendered language is rooted in the belief that minority candidates may be “too narrow” in their concerns. Against this backdrop, this article explores the campaign rhetoric of three mayors: Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, and Muriel Bowser of Washington, DC. Analyzing 62 mayoral debates using NVivo, I find that Black women candidates leverage their lived experiences, rooted in their racial and gendered identity, more than their race and gendered counterparts when advocating for their policy preferences. This work produces key insights into identity and campaign rhetoric utilized by Black women politicians.

Much of the scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) has recaptured dramatic and poignant events through eyewitness accounts and oral narratives—from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, press releases, photographs, and documentary films that summon vivid images of fire hoses and police dogs, peaceful protestors, and violent rioters (McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Payne 1994; Robnett 1997; Williams 1988). The conventional approach to (or master narrative of) civil rights history has focused almost exclusively on extraordinary, elite men from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall to such notable civil rights organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—that led the fight for equal protection under the law, desegregated lunch counters, and the right to vote in local and national elections (Branch 1988, 1998, 2006; Carson 1981; Fairclough 1987; Garrow 1986; Lewis 1993; Reed 1997; Sullivan 2009). Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of individual and collective forms of resistance, however, such an approach simplifies and distorts a more nuanced and complicated version of civil rights history in the United States. All too often people come to associate the modern CRM with celebrated heroes and a static, fixed understanding of discrimination that is less than critical of hierarchal relationships determined solely (or primarily) by a racial caste system—specifically, an era of Jim Crow when “separate but equal” accommodations were legally sanctioned by the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Far less common is an association of the modern CRM with a richer, more nuanced understanding of discrimination that is critical of hierarchal relationships determined by interlocking systems of oppression—namely, racism and sexism—experienced by forgotten heroines who similarly risked their lives and reputations for equality and justice before the law (notable exceptions being Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Giddings 1984; Gilmore 1996; Ling and Monteith 2004; Olson 2001; Robnett 1997).