Are female politicians less likely to be promoted to specific ministerial posts, and is it important for them to toe the party line? This article focuses on whether the selection of ministers has a gender-specific dimension. Building on role congruity theory and research showing that female and male politicians are evaluated in a different manner in leadership positions, we present some original hypotheses. For example, we hypothesize that female politicians are less likely to be appointed to cabinet when they have held gender-incongruent committee positions in parliament. We also hypothesize that women are less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have previously deviated from the party line. In an empirical analysis of Swedish ministerial appointments in six cabinets, we find that female politicians were less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have held positions in ‘masculine’ parliamentary committees and when they deviated from the party line in their parliamentary speeches. These results suggest that women are more harshly judged when holding positions that are not in line with traditional gender stereotypes and have important implications for our understanding of gender and political leadership.

Policy documents are a source of authority in both a legal and a normative sense. When policy documents make particular assumptions about care work requiring private, not public, consideration, this can push care, its concerns, and those who give and receive care out of the public sphere. This marginalization of care work, however, is ethically suspect, and as such I argue here that we should use the feminist ethics of care as a way to analyze current policy and guide the creation of future policy to ensure more ethically robust policy statements. I advocate for the use of care ethics in addition to human rights ethically guided public policy, which prioritizes the effort to implement human rights standards through government action. My claim is that human rights should not be our sole basis for moral and political reasoning, especially in the policy process. Policy shapes our lives, and how we live in relation to particular others. Care ethics can and should be used as an ethical guide for the policy process because it can bring to the fore how institutional patterns of power shape our relations, an analysis that human rights theories are not, in general, built to undertake.

What effects do financial crises have on women's well-being? While much research has addressed various socio-economic and political consequences of financial crises, the gendered impact of financial crises are empirically underexplored. Moreover, extant literature has mainly focused on specific crises or countries with little attempt at determining possible common effects and patterns across the world. To provide broader insight into the gendered consequences of financial crises, we examined the degree to which five types of financial crises—banking crises, currency crises, domestic sovereign debt crises, external sovereign debt crises, and inflation crises—affect women's health and educational outcomes as well as their participation in the formal economy and politics. We also examined the persistence of these effects in the postcrisis years. The results from a panel of 68 countries for the years 1980 to 2010 indicate that financial crises undermine women's participation in the formal workforce, their presence in politics, their educational attainment, and their health outcomes. We also found significant lingering effects of financial crises: the deleterious gendered effects of crises persist even seven years after the end of a crisis.

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.