In my recent explorations of black women as subjects in research-length articles that employ intersectionality, I discovered that black women are rarely, if at all, the sole subjects of such research projects (Jordan-Zachery 2011). This analysis focused on articles published, between 1996 and 2010, in two political science journals that are often ranked at the top—American Political Science Review and Journal of Politics (see Garand and Giles, 2003, on the issue of journal ranking). Also included were two political science journals whose central focus is women and politics, generally defined—Journal of Women Politics and Policy and Women & Politics. My analysis was limited to research-length articles with a U.S.-based emphasis. The data suggest the following trends: Research on intersectionality tended to treat black women in a monolithic manner; only a certain group of black women served as research subjects (elected officials dominated the research); and research tended to focus on structural and political intersectionality while ignoring representational intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991).

Increasing the number of women in positions of political power is top priority for women's movements and for governments around the world. Activists, international institutions, and national governments have come to see gender quota laws as the best way to achieve this goal. In the past 15 years, more than 40 countries have adopted measures that require a certain number of those running for or holding legislative office to be women. Political science research on this topic has hewn closely to empirical questions about this phenomenon: Under what conditions do countries adopt gender quota laws? What impact do they have on the percentage of women elected to office? What difference do “quota women” make once elected? This debate, by contrast, focuses on normative questions about gender quota laws. Are quotas a good idea? Should more countries adopt them? Should the United States consider them? We have invited leading scholars to step back from the more cautious findings of their research to tell us what they really think.

This essay draws on insights from research into human rights activism to propose a feminist human rights account of leadership that could be applied to political science. I advance the view that the practice of leadership is one of building networks and strengthening the capacity of others to advocate for themselves and their communities. In this view, leadership leverages the political and strategic capacities made possible by relative positions of privilege and so transforms the networks, capacities, and privileges of others. Mentoring is an integral part of this activist approach to leadership. In this view, leadership and mentoring are about developing the networks that make transformation possible; they are collective and political. For illustration, I begin with insights about the importance of networks learned through a personal experience in Bangladesh and juxtapose that experience with the experience of Bangladeshi labor rights organizers before providing a more general account of two key aspects of this leadership: building networks and strengthening capacity in others.

The distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor has always been critical in the context of American poverty policy. Recent work by Martin Gilens (1999), Ange-Marie Hancock (2004), and Deborah Ward (2005) has demonstrated the ways in which this distinction has been racialized. Such work illustrates the promise of an intersectional approach for fields ranging from the study of public opinion to historical institutionalism and contemporary policy analysis. Indeed, at this point in our disciplinary history, it is difficult to imagine how research in any of these areas can be done in either an empirically satisfying or normatively responsible way without attention to intersectionality.

Americans came the closest they ever had to nominating a female presidential candidate in 2008, yet the possibility of a woman president in the end remained elusive. However, in recent years a number of other countries have seen women claim the presidency for the first time: in Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, Finland, India, and Liberia. Women have also become chancellor in Germany and prime minister in countries like Moldova, Ukraine, and Mozambique. Since 2000, 27 female leaders have assumed national office as president or prime minister. It has always been difficult to generalize about women heads of state and government because there have been so few of them, but the recent rise in women executives has opened up new possibilities for comparative scholarship (see the longitudinal study by Farida Jalalzai, “Women Rule: Shattering the Executive Glass Ceiling,” in the June 2008 issue of Politics & Gender). Much of the existing literature on the subject has looked, for example, at attitudes toward women in executive position and at the media's focus on women executives' personal characteristics, their emotional state, clothing, domestic abilities, and the way they negotiate their family relations.

A central function of democratic institutions is to protect vulnerable populations. The stability and success of these institutions depends, in part, on popular support. Times of crisis can introduce novel dynamics that alter popular support for protective institutions, particularly among those who do not benefit from those protections. We explore this possibility in the context of Title IX's gender equality requirements and infrastructure to address sexual harassment in college sports. We conduct a large survey of college student-athletes to study their attitudes on these issues in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant financial challenges affecting college sports. We find that male student-athletes and those with sexist attitudes exhibit alarmingly low levels of support for ensuring the maintenance of equality and sexual harassment policy under Title IX during the COVID-19 crisis and eventual recovery. The results accentuate the vulnerability of certain populations during crises and the importance of maintaining strong institutional policy support during such times.

Gender and Social Capital. Edited by Brenda O'Neill and Elisabeth O'Neill Gidengil. New York and London: Routledge. 2006. 425 pp. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The essays in this volume constitute a feminist response to Robert Putnam's influential book Bowling Alone, and they shed light on two interrelated questions: First, how is our understanding of the nature and impact of social capital enriched by the introduction of a concern with the consequences of gender differences? Second, how is our understanding of the relationship of gender to politics deepened by an ongoing concern with social capital? As Virginia Sapiro put it (p. 152) in her exceptionally clear theoretical essay: “Wherever discussions of social capital and politics lead, our understanding of the phenomenon will be severely limited if scholars neglect the roles of gender in the creation and distribution of social capital and in the links between social capital and politics. Important aspects of the historically different cultural constructions of male and female in society and politics suggest that disregarding gender in understanding social capital is unwise. Given how different are the structures of women's and men's day-to-day lives and the different types and amounts of financial and social resources to which they have access, a ‘gender-neutral’ story of social capital and politics is likely to be a faulty story.”

This essay highlights the impact of Politics & Gender on the discipline’s understanding of how gender shapes the preferences, behavior, and motivations of voters. It provides descriptive information about the prevalence of research on gender and voting in the journal, along with the proportion of articles dedicated to women voters across different regions globally. The bulk of the essay focuses on the substance of this research — drawing out major themes and identifying significant contributions within each theme — and it concludes by offering a future research agenda on gender and voting.

We are delighted to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Politics & Gender. This achievement signals an inflection point in the maturity of the subfield of women, gender, and politics research, and provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the role that the journal has played in the discipline of political science.

Teaching gender politics has been an increasingly contentious topic in established democracies, with instructors encountering a myriad of pedagogical, institutional, and ideological challenges (Butler 2021; Evans 2019).1 Challenges to teaching gender politics are exacerbated in nondemocratic contexts, where academic institutions operate under close regime scrutiny and surveillance, and where patterns of autocratic power structures are prevalent in society and often reproduced in the classroom. While extant studies have shed important light on some of the trends and issues associated with teaching gender politics in established democracies (Bayes 2012; Han and Heldman 2019; Lyle-Gonga 2013), our knowledge remains limited when it comes to teaching gender and politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in Western institutions as well as within the MENA region. Understanding these challenges is particularly relevant given that the MENA region is diverse and has long been “othered,” “racialized,” and “orientalized” in Western discourse (Ahmed 1992; Said 1978), with direct implications for teaching gender and politics of the Middle East in local academic institutions as well as in the West.

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.