This article develops an analytical framework to study the power struggles between status quo and gender equality actors underpinning the implementation of gender equality policies. While resistance to gender equality policies in different institutions has received considerable scholarly attention, examining this struggle in light of a multifaceted concept of power that encompasses both domination and individual and collective empowerment, we argue, offers a more accurate account of the possibilities of a feminist politics of implementation. Our analytical framework also accounts for the factors that enable resistance by dominant actors and counter-resistance by gender equality actors and the informal rules that are being upheld or challenged, respectively. Applying our framework to the study of Spanish universities, we identify both the forms and types of resistance that hinder gender reform efforts in higher education institutions and the counter-action strategies that seek to drive implementation forward and achieve institutional change.

The Colombian peace process was internationally celebrated for its unprecedented focus on women's experiences of war, but the everyday violence women that may face in their homes was not acknowledged. This article explores the links between exposure to local armed conflict violence and individual women's experiences of intimate partner violence. I combine pooled nationally representative data on individual women's experiences of intimate partner violence with information about the intensity of conflict during 2004–16. Results of fixed-effects linear probability models show that conflict was generally linked to a slightly elevated risk of women experiencing emotional, physical, and sexual violence perpetrated by their partner. Among women who had experienced intimate partner violence, conflict was related to an increased probability of being partnered at interview, which could reflect women staying in abusive relationships because conflict normalizes violence or increases women's reluctance to leave those relationships.

While research on women's substantive representation in legislatures has proliferated, our knowledge of gender lobbying mechanisms in authoritarian regimes remains limited. Adopting a state-society interaction approach, this article addresses how women's interests are substantively represented in China despite the absence of an electoral mandate and the omnipresence of state power. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article maps out the intertwining of key political agents and institutions within and outside the state that mobilize for women's grievances and demands. We find that representation of women's interests in China requires the emergence of a unified societal demand followed by a coalition of state agency allies navigating within legislative, executive, and Party-affiliated institutional bodies. The pursuit of women's interests is also politically bounded and faces strong repression if the lobbying lacks state alliances or the targeted issue is considered “politically sensitive” by the government.

Operating within the androcentric premises that support idealized models of populist leadership, self-representations cultivated by female populist leaders often involve precarious balancing acts, compelling them to appropriate contextualized traditionalist discourses and modes of power to qualify for conventional leadership models. This article engages with the stylistic performance of populist leadership by Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress in the state of West Bengal, India, focusing on her adoption of the discursive mode of political asceticism, nativist rhetoric, and religious iconography. Through an interpretive analysis of selected party documents, autobiography, and semistructured interviews with Banerjee's followers and critics, the article delineates Banerjee's populist self-fashioning as a political ascetic and explores perceptions of her leadership. The article argues that while the self-makings of female populist leaders remain fraught and contested, they contribute substantially toward redrawing the boundaries of both conventional leadership models and the broader political landscapes they inhabit.

The global diffusion of #MeToo has sparked case studies and scholarly discussions (Fileborn and Loney-Howes 2019; Lee and Murdie 2020; Noel and Oppenheimer 2020), but the East Asian experience remains understudied, especially from a comparative perspective within and outside the region. The internet hashtag movement emerged from quality investigative journalism, and the movement has done what the law could not (MacKinnon 2018). Examining tweets that include the English version of the hashtag, Lee and Murdie (2020) found that women are more likely to engage in #MeToo in countries where their political rights are better protected. This finding, however, does not seem to fit East Asia's experience. The region's earliest and longest democracy, Japan, had a much milder movement than neighboring South Korea. Many South Korean women publicly named their perpetrators, but Japanese women, when sharing their experience of being harassed, mostly remained anonymous (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). Moreover, Taiwan, arguably the most gender-equal country in this region—if measured by women's political representation (42% in the national legislature) or by policies toward sexual minorities (it was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage)—has had virtually no #MeToo movement.

This article examines the instrumentalization of women's rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey. I show how the Islamically rooted Justice and Development Party governments and their allies used women's rights in constructing authoritarian rule and promoting a conservative gender agenda. The governing elites had different needs at different political stages and instrumentalized women's rights to meet those needs. First, they needed to legitimize their rule in a secular context, so they expanded liberal laws on women's rights. Second, in the process of backsliding, they sought to construct and legitimize their conservative ideology, so they reinterpreted existing laws to promote conservative goals. Finally, they wanted to mobilize conservative women in support of the newly authoritarian regime, so they built new institutions and marginalized existing women's NGOs. The article contributes to the literature on regime types and gender rights by shifting the focus from regime type to regime change.

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.

Throughout history, most positions of political power have been held by men, and despite numerous laws and regulations aimed at increasing gender equality in society and politics, the majority of democratic assemblies remain predominantly composed of men. What makes this gender composition persistent over time? Using data from Swedish population registers from 1982 to 2014 and demographic statistics from 1749 to 1859, I study how historical social norms shape the present-day gender balance in local politics. The results show that where family formation was more traditional in the past, there are fewer women in local politics today. The analysis also shows that family formation is a likely mechanism for the transmission of social norms across generations. The findings contribute to our understanding of the historical persistence of social structures and the reasons why gender balance in politics is not easily achieved.

Ministerial portfolios that promise high status, broad public visibility, and extensive financial and personnel resources continue to be men's domains. In this article, we shed light on gender inequality in ministerial selection processes by studying the duration from a minister's original appointment as a member of cabinet until he or she receives responsibility for a highly prestigious portfolio. We argue that the time it takes for ambitious politicians to prove themselves suitable for this type of cabinet position depends on their sex and the degree to which the policy area for which they are responsible reinforces stereotypical expectations about their personality traits. Empirical evidence from event history analysis of original data including detailed information on all ministerial careers in 27 European countries between 1990 to 2018 supports these propositions. These findings reveal that even highly qualified women politicians who are already members of the executive face additional barriers during their political careers.

Growing research shows a correlation between gender, benevolent sexism, partisanship, and COVID-19 public health compliance. We show first that women are more likely than men to engage in protective behaviors to slow the spread of COVID-19. We also find that while Republicans and Independents are less likely to comply with these measures, benevolent sexism moderates the effect of partisanship and can increase compliance. These results suggest that framing public health directives in terms of chivalry and protection activates benevolent sexism, potentially offsetting patterns of noncompliance associated with partisanship. We discuss the negative consequences of these results and posit a need for bipartisan messages to reduce reliance on benevolent sexism in the future.

A nascent body of literature has highlighted the violence (broadly defined) that women sometimes face as they enter politics. Some interpretations depict this violence as primarily gender motivated: women politicians are targeted because they are women. Another interpretation is that violence in some contexts is an everyday political practice targeting men and women alike. However, because we lack large-scale, systematic comparisons of men's and women's exposure to election violence, we know little about the extent to which—and how—candidate sex shapes this form of violence. We address this research gap by using original survey data on 197 men and women political candidates in the 2018 Sri Lankan local elections. Sri Lanka is a suitable case for analysis because it is a postconflict country in which political violence has been endemic and the number of women candidates has increased rapidly due to gender quota adoption. Overall, we find large similarities in men's and women's exposure to violence, suggesting that violence sometimes is part of a larger political practice. However, we find that women are exposed to forms of intimidation of a sexual nature more often than men. This finding demonstrates the need for gender-sensitive analyses of election violence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed all aspects of American life, including, for many, how we vote. We explore the question of who supports unrestricted absentee ballots during a pandemic. We argue that women are more likely to support absentee ballots because they allow for greater flexibility and minimize the potential for exposure. We test this theory using the National Panel Study of COVID-19 (n = 1,892), which asked respondents about their preferences for absentee ballots, their worry about the coronavirus, and their household composition. Using multinomial logistic regressions, we find that women are more likely to support allowing absentee ballots compared with more restrictive voting options and are more likely to say they support absentee ballots for all if they know someone who has contracted COVID-19. The policy implications for these findings are discussed along with other sociodemographic indicators in our analysis.

In this article, we explore whether women's underrepresentation among political and workplace decision makers may subject female citizens and employees to COVID-19-related decisions that are at odds with their preferences. We find that women overall, as well as female political party members, workers, and workplace leaders in particular, share a distinctively female perspective that more heavily emphasizes caution with respect to COVID-19 compared with men. Given the limited representation of women leaders across most industries and in politics, COVID-19 regulations are thus likely to be less cautious than would be the case if there were an equitable representation of women across leadership roles. We argue that female employees, in particular, face a representational “double whammy” for COVID-19: gender imbalances in workplace leadership create inequities that are compounded—rather than redressed—by unequal political representation. We conclude by addressing how this dynamic may enhance the movement of women away from Republican candidates moving forward.

How does the gender of a political leader affect policy compliance of the public during a public health crisis? State and national leaders have taken a variety of policy measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, with varying levels of success. While many female leaders have been credited with containing the spread of COVID-19, often through implementing strict policy measures, there is little understanding of how individuals respond to public health policy recommendations made by female and male leaders. This article investigates whether citizens are more willing to comply with strict policy recommendations about a public health issue when those recommendations are made by a female leader rather than a male leader. Using a survey experiment with American citizens, we compare individuals’ willingness to comply with policy along three dimensions: social distancing, face covering, and contact tracing. Our findings show that a leader's gender has little impact on policy compliance in general during the pandemic. These findings carry important implications for successful crisis management as well as understanding how a crisis in a nonmasculine issue context influences the effectiveness of a leader's ability to implement measures to mitigate the crisis.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, men have been consistently less likely to report wearing a protective face mask. There are several possible reasons for this difference, including partisanship and gender identity. Using a national live-caller telephone survey that measures gender identity, we show that men's gender identities are strongly related to their views of mask wearing, especially when gender identity is highly salient to the individual. The effects of this interaction of sex and gender are shown to be separate from the effects of partisanship. While partisanship is a significant driver of attitudes about face masks, within partisan groups, men who report “completely” masculine gender identities are very different from their fellow partisans.

Research has long observed the absence of gender in child care policy, media, and elections. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has invoked critical questions about child care and its importance to states’ economic recoveries around the world. In this research note, we analyze news coverage of child care in major Canadian daily newspapers to explore whether and how news narratives regarding child care are shifting in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, are we seeing a focus on women and gender in child care coverage amid the compounding pressures that women face in the current social and economic climate? The results of our analysis suggest that the pandemic has not shifted the conversation on child care and that current coverage principally reflects long-standing trends in child care framing. We find that gender remains systematically written out of coverage of child care, occluded by a larger focus on health-, economic-, and accessibility-related concerns about child care services.

Households in Canada and Australia have exhibited similar trends in the gendered allocation of additional child care responsibilities resulting from policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we employ survey data to analyze the extent to which policy interventions related to COVID-19 have exacerbated gender disparities in child care obligations. We find that existing asymmetrical distributions of child care obligations in Canada and Australia have been amplified during the pandemic, resulting in a disproportionate burden on women. During the pandemic we also find that, in households with children, women tend to report experiencing poorer mental health than men.

The connection between women leaders and superior pandemic performance is likely spurious. This narrative overlooks that women currently govern precisely the kinds of countries that should mount effective pandemic responses: wealthy democracies with high state capacity. This article maps where women currently serve as presidents and prime ministers. The article then uses data from the Varieties of Democracy Project and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to show that many women-led countries score high on state capacity and that high-capacity states have low coronavirus mortality regardless of whether they are led by women or by men. Arguments emphasizing women chief executives’ superior pandemic performance, while offered in good faith, are misleading.