For feminists interested in questions of freedom, the current era is as exciting as it is paradoxical. As we move into the second decade of the millennium, we find ourselves witnessing enhanced opportunities for women in many areas of life: More women than ever are earning college degrees and attending graduate and professional school, more women are now represented at the highest levels of government, and women continue to make major gains in the workplace (Rosin 2010a, 2010b). And while this progress is far from equal among the various populations of women, it is safe to say that within the United States, women today face fewer restrictions and have more options and opportunities to act in the world than ever before. Yet despite the increased presence of women and people of color within various elite circles, this is also a time of widening economic inequality. This condition of enhanced opportunity for an increasingly diverse elite alongside widespread and deepening inequality has important implications for the ways that feminists understand the dynamics of freedom today.

A scholarly consensus depicts strong, autonomous domestic women's movements as critical for the passage of gender equality reforms, alongside openings in domestic and international political contexts. What, then, is a nascent women's movement seeking gender equality reforms to do if it lacks strength or a history of autonomous organizing? A long-term analysis of the Guatemalan women's movement's push for reforms to address violence against women demonstrates that one potential road forward is through a “politics of patience,” rooted in the pursuit of cumulative, incremental victories. Adopting a politics of patience allows nascent domestic movements in developing and post-transition contexts to achieve incremental victories that create future political openings while simultaneously building movement strength and autonomy over time. This finding highlights the temporal and strategic power of women's movements, as well as the iterative and potentially reinforcing nature of social mobilization and political reform.

Do voters rely on gendered stereotypes when evaluating candidates in Brazil? The literature shows that gendered stereotypes about politicians can result in women being consistently judged as unfit for office. This article investigates the influence of gendered stereotypes on voters’ preferences in a context that combines severe female underrepresentation and incentives for voters to rely on politicians’ personal attributes. In two survey experiments, I identify the gendered stereotypes of politicians in Brazil and estimate how they influence voters’ behavior toward hypothetical candidates who do or do not comply with those stereotypes. The findings suggest that voters hold positive stereotypes of women and a broad pro-female bias.

On August 6, 2016, the week of the South African public holiday Women’s Day, an extraordinary protest held the nation spellbound. Then president Jacob Zuma was announcing the results of local government elections live on national television when four young women walked out of the throng of election officials and politicians. They stood in front of the president, silent but visible on the televised screen. They held up placards: “I am 1 in 3,” “Ten Years Later,” “Khanga,” “Remember Khwezi.” Although the protesters stood for the duration of the broadcast, they were forcibly removed by security agents immediately after Zuma left the stage and the cameras moved offscreen. Hustled to the back of the room, they were lambasted by senior women leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) for their “inappropriate” action. This was a spectacular demonstration: silent and nonviolent, its tactics and timing pierced the performance of presidential authority and made visible a new form of feminism.

Despite gains at lower levels, women have made limited inroads into leadership roles in international organizations. Using a novel data set of both nominees and selected heads of 129 international organizations, we uncover several empirical patterns. Women’s representation at the highest levels remains far below parity but has been improving steadily since the 1990s. One caveat is that this improvement has only occurred in a subset of institutions, which suggests a concentration of women leaders. Based on the available data, we examine whether the appointment of a woman leader impacts equality in the institution’s overall staffing profile. We find that such changes occur only once there is a history of appointing women. We also look at the nominations process and find that when women are included in the nominee pool, they tend to be selected, although often they are absent. Our analysis contributes much-needed data to the broader literature on leadership in international organizations and introduces a new data set with a range of other potential applications.

Jane Mansbridge’s (1999) “contingent ‘yes’” amplified a chorus of voices discussing the substantive and symbolic functions of historically marginalized groups’ presence in political office. In her essay, Mansbridge points to contexts of mistrust and uncrystallized interests as domains where presence enhances “adequate communication” and “innovative thinking” for these social groups (628). In this and many other accounts, the linchpin between descriptive and substantive representation for these functions is group members’ shared experiences, alternatively framed as the perspectives informed by those experiences. Shared experiences cannot and do not produce identical effects (they are filtered through many lenses), but they are widely understood to inform and indeed often to authenticate political representation.

Western political thought, from the classical Greek era to our own time, is notorious for its relegation of bodily and family matters to the private sphere. Contemporary feminist and critical political theorists have taken measures to counter this impulse. Yet even as these discourses acknowledge the centrality of the body, vulnerability, and relationality for social and political theory, they continue to functionally disavow giving birth as an important cultural institution in which to engage political and ethical questions.

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.

Bringing home federal spending projects to the district is a common reelection strategy for members of the U.S. Congress, and congresswomen tend to outperform congressmen in securing district spending. However, for legislators to turn distributive benefits into higher approval and electoral rewards, constituents must recognize that public spending has taken place in their community and attribute credit to the correct public official. I theorize that congresswomen face a gender bias when claiming credit for federal projects, and I test this theory through an online survey experiment. Contrary to expectations, I find no evidence that legislator gender influences the public’s reaction to congressional credit claims, indicating that congresswomen can effectively use distributive politics to counter gendered vulnerability in the U.S. Congress. This research advances the literature on gender and politics by investigating whether a gender bias in credit claiming prevents congresswomen from turning their representational efforts into electoral capital.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, one of the most provocative thinkers on religion, political philosophy, feminism, and ethics, died August 11, 2013. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School, Political Science, and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. The contributors to this section participated in a retrospective roundtable on her work at the 2014 American Political Science Association.

Teaching gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is often marked by pedagogical, sociocultural, and political challenges. In the MENA context, the effects of authoritarian politics, conservative cultural understanding of gender relations, and neoliberal policies intersect in the classroom. Amid such a charged setting, applying a feminist pedagogy that subverts paradigms of power and preexisting socioeconomic realities in the classroom is increasingly contentious, yet even more necessary.

I would like to begin with an observation about Iris Marion Young's legacy. She has set us very high standards. Her approach to justice was far from the Rawlsian notion that the way to proceed is to consider what principles we would agree to if we were in some ideal, hypothetical situation. She was concerned with the here and now: What does justice ask of us in a very unequal, unjust, and hardly democratic world? She insisted that justice has exacting requirements. She questioned “the common intuition that the moral claims of justice ought not to be too demanding on individuals” (2004, 383). As members of the privileged rich part of the world's population, we have a responsibility to do all that we can to further justice, but she also argued that the oppressed too should do whatever they could. She wanted us to get out of our academic offices, at least sometimes, into the real world—and, unusually, she did so. She practised what she preached.

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.