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.”

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.

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.

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).

“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.

Mexico is usually described as a secular country with a Catholic following that remains above the regional average. In this context, a strong presence of feminist institutional activism and a relatively weak performance of Evangelical religious conservative activism have developed (Pérez Guadalupe 2017). This essay reviews these usual descriptions in order to adjust this image, undertaking the task of avoiding both overestimating and underestimating the scope of these activisms. The essay also identifies emerging challenges for research on politics and gender in Mexico and Latin America more generally.

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.

The gender and politics literature offers diverse views on the causes of gendered practices and the best methodologies for studying them. This article advances efforts to take stock of and systematize this diversity by grounding the feminist institutionalist perspective in critical realism. The article posits that gendered institutions are real entities with independent powers, while also emphasizing the crucial role that human ideas play in upholding and contesting gendered practices. To faithfully capture gendered institutions and their relationship with human agency, the article promotes the use of the abductive-retroductive research design. This approach allows feminist institutionalist scholars to construct and test multiple competing theories about gendered institutions, drawing from various empirical manifestations of institutional power. These expressions range from observable actions to codified rules, socially shared norms, and other subtle discourses. By shedding light on the principles at the heart of realist-oriented feminist research, this work paves the way for a more standardized and transparent approach to feminist inquiries.

The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing a unique data set containing information on nearly 7,000 candidates running in three elections with preferential voting in postwar Croatia. Our analysis demonstrates that voters’ gender bias is conditional on the local electorate’s ideology and exposure to war violence, with voters of right-wing parties and voters in areas more affected by war violence being more biased against female candidates. These effects of ideology and exposure to war violence also exhibit a strong interactive relationship, suggesting that bias against women is strongest among right-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence and reversed among left-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence. Our findings highlight the need to better understand the relationship between gender, ideology, and violence in postconflict societies.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have increased their promotion of women in public life. The expansion of women's rights in these states functions as a central policy tool to stimulate modernization processes. This article investigates how the Gulf governments steer women's empowerment through the press. Regulated by the state, media outlets in GCC countries primarily serve to affirm and amplify the legitimacy of the government. Focusing on 15 English-language newspapers from 2008 to 2017, this article analyzes the degree to which women's empowerment in various arenas of society was addressed and the valence with which it was reported. Moreover, it analyzes whether foreign and domestic news were addressed differently. The article finds that once nondemocracies focus on women's rights, positive media portrayals, especially of domestic news, become central for legitimizing both women's empowerment and the regime. The article contributes to the growing literature on women's rights legislation and the state-media nexus in autocracies.

Why are civil society organizations so often unable to make a difference during the transition to peace? I argue that the contributions of local civil society organizations and women's organizations to postconflict peacebuilding should be understood in terms of the networks that emerge during the peacebuilding process. Horizontal network conditions are essential for successful postconflict reconstruction. Yet external actors often implement policies that strengthen hierarchical links at the expense of such horizontal networks. To explore the types of networks that emerge in postconflict reconstruction, I use semistructured interviews conducted in Liberia. The evidence suggests that emerging horizontal networks are more robust in areas where local communities and women have a tradition of organizing. However, these networks remain fairly unstable. The assistance is mostly channeled centrally, strengthening hierarchical ties and leading to distortions in the distribution of resources.

In “Gender in the Aggregate, Gender in the Individual, Gender and Political Action,” Nancy Burns makes the compelling argument to integrate individual- and aggregate-level perspectives in the study of gendered political action. She issues a call for action for the two to assess similarities and differences in approaches, identify unique contributions and weaknesses, and move forward to better understand gender and political action. Beyond this general goal is an ambitious effort to build a theory of politicized context around gender in order to stake out a position for political science to contribute to our understanding of women in action. In this regard, her ambitions are to identify mechanisms that work to strengthen normative goals of enhancing equality and dignity in women's lives, and in politics more generally.For helpful comments, I thank Nadia Brown, Sue Carroll, Mary Hawkesworth, Hannah Holden, Anna Mitchell, Kira Sanbonmatsu, participants at the conference on Political Women and American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame in May 2006, and the editors of Politics & Gender.

This study, which is based on a survey of women's organizations’ staff members, answers two previously unexamined questions about women's groups’ participation in the rulemaking process: (1) How do women's organizations participate? (2) What are the characteristics of the women's organizations that are the most likely to participate? About one-quarter (27%) of women's organizations reported that they lobby rulemakers, often using relatively low-cost methods, such as submitting comments or signing on to comments written by coalitions or like-minded groups. Women's organizations with large staffs that are structured the most like political insiders or influential economic interest groups were the most likely to participate in the process, potentially biasing participation in favor of relatively advantaged subgroups of women. Together, these results suggest that although rulemaking presents unique opportunities to represent women, the most marginalized women may be underrepresented during rulemaking debates.

Past research has identified several factors that help explain what happened to civic engagement after World War II, but it has not adequately explained how these factors mattered to particular groups of citizens defined by gender, race, or class. This essay reexamines the dominant account of postwar civic decline by highlighting the relational nature of political change and the processes through which social groups transform. It explores the development of three women's associations: the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), and Woman's Division of Christian Service (WDCS) (predecessor of the United Methodist Women). A variety of postwar changes—in the realities of women's lives, the appearance of new social movement organizations, and the formation of the United Nations, for example—pressured the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS to adopt new organizational methods that blurred civic–political distinctions. Postwar women's associations experimented with the structures, strategies, and identities now common to modern-day interest groups, providing a critical foundation for a new politics of gender that would emerge in the 1960s. If these reinvented and ascendant organizations were more attuned to emerging political opportunities, however, they also translated into less active and less inclusive forms of participation.The author would like to thank Kristi Andersen, Elisabeth Clemens, McGee Young, Kathleen Laughlin, and the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender for their thoughtful contributions to this manuscript. Draft sections of this essay were presented at 2004 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Journal of Policy History, and the Social Science History Association.