The literature on gender and political action comes in two forms – one that is aggregate, sometimes institutional, and often centered historically, and one that is individual and largely focused on the here and now. We care about both, of course – about the social organization and deployment of gender and about what gender means in individual lives. In this chapter, I argue that we should encourage these two kinds of analysis to engage each other more intimately. This engagement would give political scientists the tools to say more about when, for whom, and for which outcomes gender matters. The conversation would give us better ways to understand how context makes gender relevant.

I believe gender is a property of collections of people and social systems. We care about it because it is about systematic disadvantage and advantage. In this chapter, I am especially interested in thinking about tools for identifying the political contexts in which this disadvantage and advantage come to matter in individual lives.

If Iris Young is right in saying that gender is not much about a “self-consciously, mutually acknowledging collective with a self-conscious purpose,” that instead gender is a “less organized and unself-conscious collective unity” (Young 1994, 724), then part of our task as social scientists interested in gender is to come to understand when social and political contexts can make gender relevant, sometimes in a way that people notice and call “gender,” and sometimes not.