At a time of pandemics, international economic downturns, and increasing environmental threats due to climate change, countries around the world are facing numerous crises. What impact might we expect these crises to have on the already common perception that executive leadership is a masculine domain? For years, women executives’ ability to lead has been questioned (Jalalzai 2013). However, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought headlines like CNN’s “Women Leaders Are Doing a Disproportionately Great Job at Handling the Pandemic” (Fincher 2020). Do crises offer women presidents and prime ministers opportunities to be perceived as competent leaders? Or do they prime masculinized leadership expectations and reinforce common conceptions that women are unfit to lead? We maintain that people’s perceptions of crisis leadership will depend on whether the crisis creates role (in)congruity between traditional gender norms and the leadership expectations generated by the particular crisis.

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.

There is optimism that the growing number of women in political office will reorient the focus of international politics toward more social and humanitarian issues. One basis for this optimism is the argument that women legislators hold distinct foreign policy preferences and act on them to affect changes in policy. However, we know little about gender differences in the behavior of individual legislators on these issues. This study investigates the behavior of individual legislators of the United States, one of the most important actors in international politics, in the context of development aid. Analyzing a diverse set of legislative behaviors in the U.S. Congress, we find no evidence that women legislators behave any differently than men with regard to these issues. Beyond its contribution to our understanding of the making and future of American foreign policy, this study contributes to broader debates about women’s representation and foreign policy.

Underlying almost every conversation about descriptive representation are questions about whether gender does and should always matter in politics. More specifically, those conversations rest on assumptions about whether political scientists should always evaluate the performance of political actors based on their membership in historically disadvantaged groups. How one answers that question can be problematic: A “yes” suggests that democratic citizens should evaluate the performance of members of historically disadvantaged groups using criteria (burdens?) beyond those used to evaluate members of privileged groups. A “ no ” seems to challenge the theoretical arguments for why the presence of historically disadvantaged groups is necessary. Admitting that not every woman in politics is a preferable descriptive representative for women seems to implicitly support having more men in politics and, thereby, the preferences that perpetuate male dominance in politics. Faced with such a quagmire of competing assumptions, those who study descriptive representation must balance concerns about essentializing women on one hand and reinforcing male dominance in politics on the other hand.

Black women in elective office in the United States have demonstrated how descriptive representative transforms democratic institutions. This transformation is most evident in previously uncrystallized interests, those new to the agenda or not yet owned by specific political groups (Mansbridge 1999), articulated in legislative communication and action. For instance, Black maternal health is an issue that addresses the disproportionately poor health outcomes among Black women, who face systemic barriers to equitable care (Crear-Perry et al. 2021). Congresswoman Lauren Underwood’s (D-IL) 2021 Momnibus legislation included 12 bipartisan bills to address racial and ethnic disparities faced by mothers, children, and individuals who birth. Indeed, the creation of the Black Maternal Health Caucus (BMHC) demonstrates the legislative agency of Black women to form identity- and issue-based coalitions that suit the needs of Black women—needs often overlooked by Black men and white women.

As instructors, we are quite familiar with students coming to our classes loaded with preconceived notions. For instance, some believe that male instructors are better at math, while others think that markets, if left on their own, will produce wealth for everyone. Teaching about gender and politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at an American college is no different. Students come to class rarely knowing the basic facts, history, or culture of the region, mostly because the K–12 educational curriculum in the United States does not typically cover the MENA region. However, students’ lack of formal education on the MENA region does not mean they are unexposed to its issues, which are frequent topics in American media. Unfortunately, students often hold misconceptions and deep biases about women, culture, and politics in the region, and these misconceptions impair the learning process by acting as a “psychological block” for the students. As Haddad and Schwedler (2013, 211) put it, “our years of teaching undergraduates have taught us how images of harems, pyramids, and desert warriors wielding sabers on camelback still shape many Americans’ perceptions of the region.” This essay discusses some of the challenges that instructors teaching gender and politics in the MENA region face in an American college classroom. No single course can eradicate old paradigms and prejudices. However, this piece proposes some strategies for effective teaching about gender and politics of the MENA region.

Across the academy, there is growing concern over diversity within academic institutions. According to recent research published in three top political science journals, members of historically marginalized groups remain underrepresented and marginalized in submissions, publications, and even reviewer pools (Ayoub 2022; Bell et al. 2020; Reinhardt, Windsor, and King 2022). Expectations that scholars, especially early career researchers (ECRs), “publish or perish” thus exacerbate intersectional inequalities within the discipline (Briscoe-Palmer and Mattocks 2021; McKenzie 2017; Steinþórsdóttir et al. 2018). Further, the overwhelming pressure to publish at all costs can commodify knowledge production and foster a toxic, competitive environment based on peer rivalry rather than collaboration for the sake of advancing knowledge (Horta and Li 2023, 269–70, 271–72).

The interaction of the legislative and executive is gendered in nature. Gender shapes what actors in these two institutions demand from each other. This pattern is visible, for instance, in the distinct policy priorities of women and men in parliament (e.g., Allen and Childs 2019; Bäck and Debus 2019; Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019) and in the ways that women engage and oversee related government initiatives. At the same time, gender influences the strengths and weaknesses that actors in the legislature and executive ascribe to each other and, hence, their mutual assessment. Members of parliament (MPs) and party gatekeepers, for instance, tend to favor men for the most influential and well-resourced portfolios, since they believe that masculine traits are necessary or suitable to succeed in governmental positions, and membership in men-dominated political networks remains an important route to qualify for ministerial office (see, e.g., Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet 2019; Krook and O’Brien 2012). Change in these dynamics is scarce or occurs only gradually, meaning that the ways in which executive-legislative interactions are gendered are usually stable.

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.

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.

Citizen protests are common political phenomena, ranging in size, kind, and impact. This essay focuses on a unique kind of citizen protest that reaches a crisis threshold: massive uprisings accompanied by violence and system-level critiques, expressed in phrases such as “It is not 30 cents, it is 30 years,” used by protesters in Chile in 2019–20. Crises meeting this definition have occurred in countries as diverse as Iceland in 2009, Hong Kong in 2019, Chile, and Colombia in 2019–21. In contrast with economic crises (Strolovitch 2013), protesters—not necessarily elites—perform the discursive work of (re)interpreting material and political conditions. Protesters’ framing of their grievances may overwhelm elite attempts to reinterpret these crises for their benefit. We argue that protest-driven crises can alter gendered opportunity structures, but outcomes are likely multifaceted and potentially contradictory.

In the field of political science, scholars can contribute to the growing literature on gender and politics in multiple ways. While research articles remain important for scholars to communicate their research, they are not the only way. Scholars might consider other means to contribute to the scholarship, such as through research notes, book reviews, and review essays (a particular type of literature review). Specific to Politics & Gender, Critical Perspectives and Notes from the Field are two more avenues for scholars to engage in the gender and politics scholarly conversation. Each of these publication types provides a way for scholars to participate in the conversation about current political phenomena, research innovations, or topics of concern in the field. In what follows, I distinguish between the type of publishing opportunities available in the field of political science and the options specific to Politics & Gender. I also discuss what scholars should think about when considering the type of publication they want to submit.

Scholarship on critical pedagogy is mostly written from within the democratic and neoliberal North American and British contexts (Giroux 2003, 2004, 2010; McCusker 2017; Mehta 2019). Geraldine McCusker (2017, 447) eloquently sums up the aim of this scholarship as “to establish a schooling system that emancipated those oppressed and disempowered. Critical pedagogues aim to provide space for critical engagement with divergent perspectives in order to support students from disenfranchised populations to understand the impact of capitalism, gender, race and homophobia on their lives.”

For nearly 20 years, Politics & Gender has been a leading outlet for research on women, gender, and politics. As past and current editors,1 we are happy to share our advice for early career researchers interested in submitting manuscripts to the journal. We believe that as the official journal of the Women, Gender, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, the content of Politics & Gender should reflect the diversity of authors, methods, and topics found across the broader gender and politics research community. However, not all authors have the full information on how to best prepare their manuscripts—or, indeed, what to expect during different parts of the review process (see Anlar and Phillips 2023).

Women’s political rights and their exercise of political citizenship globally have often expanded more rapidly in times of conflict, crisis, and revolution. The decline of empires after World Wars I and II and the creation of new nations served as a catalyst for the expansion of women’s suffrage. Civil wars and revolutions have had similar outcomes in expanding women’s political citizenship. This essay brings together several disparate literatures on World War I, World War II, wars of independence, revolution, and post-1990 civil wars and expands their scope to show how women’s political rights and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often been linked to conflict. In doing so, I highlight a notable pathway by which rights expansions occurred: conflict led to changes in the political elite and ruling class, resulting in the necessity to rewrite constitutions and other rules of the polity. During these critical junctures, women’s rights activists gained opportunities to advance their demands. The context of changing international gender norms also influenced these moments. I consider two key moments in the worldwide expansion of political citizenship: the struggle for women’s suffrage and the struggle to expand women’s representation in local and national representative bodies.

Descriptive representation is commonly understood as the proportion of women or racial minorities in an institution. While useful, this approach is limited in its ability to capture intersectional identities, less visible characteristics, and the extent to which particular characteristics are more or less central to one’s identity. Traditional approaches have raised concerns about essentialism—“the assumption that members of certain groups have an essential identity that all members of that group share” (Mansbridge 1999, 637). This assumption can lead to faulty logic—for example, that any woman can represent all women. Traditional approaches have also focused on visible characteristics, rather than shared experiences. These limitations affect not only who counts as a descriptive representative, but also our ability to assess which descriptive representatives will be most likely to contribute to substantive and symbolic representation.

Peer review is a key component of academic publishing, meant to maintain the integrity of the process. Peer reviewers help editors evaluate research—assessing the quality, validity, and original contribution of manuscripts submitted for publication. At its best, peer review can also help raise the quality of published research by providing authors with constructive expert feedback that helps them further develop and polish their project and its presentation.

Over the past few decades, the Arab Gulf has witnessed tremendous socioeconomic and structural transformation coupled with major reforms to modernize the higher education sector. These reforms have focused on establishing partnerships with foreign universities and/or hosting international branch campuses to promote diverse, liberal, and high-quality educational programs. While these far-reaching reforms have undeniably led to a dramatic increase in the number of academic institutions (Baghdady 2017), these institutions have mostly reproduced traditional educational structures and paradigms, with little contribution to the advancement of more liberal and progressive ideas and/or areas of study, namely, gender and women’s studies (GWS).

A much-circulated image during the Donald Trump administration showed Vice President Mike Pence and members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus discussing the removal of maternity coverage from the Affordable Care Act—with not a single woman or person of color among them. In another image, white men watched approvingly as Trump signed an executive order reinstating the global gag rule, which bans foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive American aid from supporting abortion access. These images contrast with one from early in Joe Biden’s presidency. In his first address to Congress, Biden was backed by two women occupying the second- and third-most-powerful positions in the country, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, respectively. After acknowledging “Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President,” Biden said, “No president ever said those words and it is about time.”

In 2019, visible, “rapid onset” climate-related disasters displaced roughly 24.9 million people, with more than 143 million anticipated to be internally displaced by 2050 in Latin America, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa (Kaczan and Orgill-Meyer 2020). Not only can climate change induce migration, but, I argue, climate shocks—which I define as discrete, unanticipated destruction due to weather such as floods, drought, or windstorms—can also destabilize gendered social systems. Climate shocks can initiate political transformations that open new space for women in representative politics. Additionally, they can compel women to mobilize—as representatives and their supporters—to redirect local and national political agendas to respond to the vulnerabilities exposed by climate shocks.