In the 20 years since the founding of Politics & Gender, gender and politics scholarship has coalesced into a distinct body of research and community of scholarship (Sawer 2025; Tripp 2025). The research published in this journal and others cuts across the traditional political science subfields, methodological approaches, and regional boundaries. While engaging with different topics and parts of the larger discipline, gender and politics research distinguishes itself through its turning around a shared understanding that gender plays a critical explanatory role in our political worlds – whether that be in the gendered ways that politics is enacted or the gendered consequences of political actions. There is a shared language of scholarship amongst researchers.

I, Mary Caputi, was humbled and honored to be offered the editorship of Politics & Gender, a position that I filled between 2016–19. With my hard-working associate editors Sun Young Kwak, Steve Gonzales, and Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, we strove to build upon the journal’s already strong reputation as an agenda-setting academic publication that offers cutting-edge scholarship in all areas of gender studies. Because the relationship between “politics and gender” is so rich and complex, we tried to faithfully represent the depth and variety of interplay in our scholarly articles, Critical Perspectives contributions, Special Issues, and our choice of books to be reviewed. As a team, the task of editing the journal sent us on an enlightening journey that proved both challenging and educational. Throughout my tenure, I learned a great deal about my own field of contemporary feminist theory, and about how gender is studied in other subfields of political science and other academic disciplines across the university.

We launch Politics & Gender with the conviction that the study of women and politics, and the gendered analysis of politics, benefit and strengthen political science. We hold the reverse conviction as well: the tools of political analysis advance and strengthen our understandings of women and of gender. Politics & Gender is the official journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. This new journal is thus situated firmly within the discipline of political science. While we maintain extensive interdisciplinary commitments, our primary purpose is to publish research on women and politics and on politics and its gendered analysis. Gender cuts through every aspect of politics. In Politics & Gender, we seek to represent the full array of questions, issues, and approaches within the discipline. We envision each issue as a showcase of work across all the major subfields of political science, including (but not limited to) political theory, comparative politics, international relations, and U.S. politics. We invite studies that address fundamental questions in politics and political science concerning women and concerning gender, including those that interrogate and challenge standard analytical categories and conventional methodologies.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed new challenges for leaders, requiring behavior change and public self-compliance. Stereotypically feminine qualities, such as compassion and a good approach to people, may have helped achieve these goals, rendering the pandemic a “feminine crisis.” The special nature of this crisis, along with media attention on female-led countries successfully managing the pandemic, raises the question of whether female leaders would be perceived as more competent in handling such a crisis. In an experimental study conducted on a representative sample in Poland, we assessed whether female prime minister candidates or candidates with feminine traits had an advantage when their competence in managing a large-scale pandemic was evaluated. Surprisingly, we found that, contrary to national security and economic crises (where male or masculine candidates tend to be advantaged), women or feminine candidates were not perceived as having an advantage in managing a COVID-19 type crisis. Furthermore, conservative participants seemed to perceive male candidates as more competent, even in the pandemic context. Although the differences were small in magnitude, they suggest that even in a potentially “feminine crisis,” women do not fare better than men, while men still fare better in stereotypically male crises.

The #MeToo movement in Hong Kong emerged in late 2017, subsequently converged with the Anti-Extradition Law protest in 2019, and evolved into the #ProtestToo campaign against police violence and sexual assult. This essay traces the development of the #MeToo movement and analyzes the collaboration among the government, civil society, and the media in fostering the movement to combat sexual violence. It argues that whether the collaborative model succeeds or fails depends upon sociocultural and political circumstances: the failure of existing measures in preventing, investigating, and prosecuting the alleged sexual assaults inflicted on protesters in 2019 reveals how a shift to authoritarian governance may cripple the established anti–sexual violence collaboration.

For decades, African women have participated in the Black feminist struggle for women’s rights and racial, social, economic, and political justice (Collins 2017; Tamale 2020). In the 1950s, during the fight for independence across the continent, a radical and transnational feminist movement emerged with African women’s protests to “crack the norms of gender and colonial order” (Ndengue 2016) in both urban and rural postcolonial contexts (Falola and Paddock 2011; Mougoué 2019; Nchoji Nkwi 1985; Ndengue 2018). Protests have transnational effects (Johnson-Odim 2009; Terretta 2013). Today, transnationalism relies on social media platforms as sites of calls to action. They constitute alternative public spaces for expression and activism in constrained political environments (Ngono 2018) and platforms that facilitate informal transnational connections. These transnational connections are accompanied by explicit and assertive claims of feminism by a growing number of (young) women.

In the previous issue, scholars Jane Mansbridge, Mark P. Jones, and Miki Caul Kittilson addressed a series of questions about gender quota laws. Are quotas a good idea? Should more countries adopt them? Should the United States consider them? In this issue, three additional scholars weigh in. Lisa Baldez considers the pros and cons of gender quota laws on the basis of research she has done on the adoption and implementation of a gender quota law in Mexico. Mona Lena Krook maintains that the adoption of gender quota laws often reveals the deep-rooted nature of gender discrimination in existing processes of candidate recruitment. Finally, Medha Nanivadekar reflects on the lessons that can be drawn about gender quota laws from the example of the reserved seats for women in India, a measure that “created 1 million slots for women.”

Globally, women's movements share the twin concerns of equality within the family and freedom from domestic violence. The following questions conjoin and animate these debates: Given that violence against women is a global phenomenon, why are some states more effective at controlling domestic violence than others? What is the correlation between inequality encoded in family laws and the rate of violence against women in society? Are legally plural states more likely to demonstrate a higher degree of institutionalized inequality and gender-based violence within the family? The analytical peg for Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen (2012) is the feminist evolutionary analytic approach (FEAA) that explains the almost universal prevalence of male dominance among humans during the course of formation of societies. It suggests that violence against women is greater in legal systems that design family law to maximize men's rights.

The subfield of women and politics research, established two decades ago, has followed a developmental trajectory of empirical research, original feminist theorizing, and new concept formation and evaluation. An early emphasis on women and politics—concern with political behavior, with voting patterns and gender gaps, with political institutional presence and women as political elites—involved crucial foundational work for the subfield. Empirical research focused on finding where women were politically located, what political power they had, and what “politics” meant for women; the availability of survey research data that included a “sex” variable, and the identification of specific female political elites channeled early work into questions that could be answered by—or that permitted the contestation of—these data. The earliest research grappled with comparisons of women and men in politics; subsequent research focused primarily upon women, and upon women across politically relevant differences (in the U.S. case, particularly in regard to race). Feminist theory began to contest, to deconstruct, and to reconstruct gendered concepts of power, of equality and difference, of justice, and of democracy, some of which empirical scholars began to import into their research.

Not quite 15 years ago, the International Studies Association (ISA) sponsored an investigation into the status of women in the profession. Most of the conclusions were not too far from what Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael Tierney report in this issue: Women are underrepresented among academics in political science as a whole, and especially in the field of international relations. They also are underrepresented in higher academic ranks. Although they publish at about the same rate as their male counterparts, women's work is far less likely to be cited or mentioned as influential in the field. The “Women in International Relations” study by Maliniak and his coauthors shows that not much has changed—or has it?

Many studies have investigated why countries adopt gender quotas for their elections. In this article, we answer a different question: why do political parties comply with gender quotas when the costs of noncompliance are absent or minimal? To answer this question, we analyze data from 1,600 party lists and 106 parties competing across 121 cities in the 2015 municipal elections in Ukraine. Our subnational approach tests whether contextual factors flagged by the broader gender literature explain variation in compliance across localities. The results of our models support our contention that Ukrainian political parties behaved strategically in terms of nominations and quota compliance. We find that urbanization and female incumbency fueled quota compliance. Parties, however, were less likely to comply with quotas in cities with more Ukrainian speakers. We suggest that the politics of memory explain this outcome, as Ukrainian speakers are more likely to remember of the costs of Soviet rule.

Building upon the theoretical framework of Italian activist and scholar Antonio Gramsci, and using historical and public administrative sources, this article argues that while social justice feminism as a social movement in the United States declined by 1940, former participants continued their counter-hegemonic actions after World War II. Facing a new political and cultural hegemony increasingly dominated by fears of atomic annihilation, Soviet domination, and domestic Communist infiltration, women progressives, such as Frieda Miller and Esther Peterson, developed new approaches to continuing their counter-hegemonic aims, particularly through reviving an alternative view of public administration. Miller and Peterson thus helped prepare the way for women's activism in the United States to shift from economic security to equal rights by the mid-1960s, thus establishing an increasingly effective counter-hegemonic effort against the continuing patriarchal hegemony.

One of the most important contributions of feminist theory is the rethinking of core concepts, such as freedom and autonomy. While the inspiration for this rethinking is often the way traditional concepts fail women, the constructive project of reconstruction routinely goes beyond a focus on the particular significance for women—or gender or sexuality. For example, the canon failed to recognize not only the centrality of care work in women's lives but also the underlying issue of dependence as characteristic of human life (MacIntyre 1999). Integrating this dependence into conceptual reformulation has then led to the argument that theories of justice must include the distribution of care work (Kittay 1999) and to the rejection of independence as a key element of autonomy (Nedelsky 2011a). Of course, these reconceptualizations have important consequences for women's lives and for our collective understandings of gender and sexuality. But those important consequences are not the focus of every theoretical contribution.

This article considers Mary Wollstonecraft as a theorist of freedom for women through the lens of social constructivism. Previous republican readings of Wollstonecraft as promoting a vision of freedom as independence or non-domination are compromised by their underpinnings in liberal individualism. Instead, we suggest her theory displays elements of positive liberty and particularly what we call “subjectivity freedom.” Reading Wollstonecraft as an early social constructivist, we show her grappling with how women's subjectivity is constructed in patriarchal societies such that they desire the conditions of their own subordination. This troubles the very notion of domination and its putative opposite, freedom-as-independence. Paradoxically, while noting how women's sense of self was profoundly and intimately shaped by the patriarchal structures they inhabited, Wollstonecraft's own argument was limited by these same constructions. Nonetheless, she struggled to conceive a radically emancipatory vision of women's lives, aspirations, and desires from within the confines of a context and discourse premised on their devaluation. A social constructivist approach shows that Wollstonecraft sought not simply to change women or specific structures of male dominance, but rather the processes within which men and women defined gender, the family, and personal identity: in short, their subjectivity.