Since its foundation, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted gender equality, at least at the level of official rhetoric. Despite some progress in their social and economic lives, women have not been able to make headway in Chinese politics. Many scholars have studied this topic, but due to the CCP's political sensitivity, systematic data are not available. Drawing on a unique data set about provincial-level elites, I quantify gender inequality in Chinese politics and test several commonly held hypotheses. Although most empirical studies of Chinese women in politics focus on the National People's Congress (NPC), this paper focuses on officials in the Party-State, on the grounds that they wield more power than members of the NPC. Female leaders of the Party-State are more likely to be drawn from nonparty members and to occupy less prestigious positions than male leaders. There is no evidence, however, indicating that women and ethnic minority status are associated, or that women face more difficulties entering more powerful branches of the Party-State. Cross-regional analysis finds that political institutions, socioeconomic conditions, and culture have all played some role in promoting or hindering women's political careers.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago. I thank Louise Davidson-Schmich, Ying Huang, Marc Moskowitz, Dali Yang, two editors, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and excellent suggestions. Anesa Uda-Diaz has offered excellent research support.

This study aims to advance our understanding of why women are underrepresented in legislatures around the world, and what accounts for the wide variation over time and across countries. Scholars generally agree on many of the favorable conditions for women to enter parliament, including, inter alia, proportional representation, leftism in government, and female employment. However, the mechanisms that link women's seat shares to the supposed explanatory factors are still poorly understood. In this study, we argue that the key link resides in welfare state policies that 1) free women to enter the paid workforce, 2) provide public sector jobs that disproportionately employ women, and 3) change the political interests of working women enough to create an ideological gender gap. The emergence of this gender gap, in turn, creates incentives for parties to compete for the female vote, and one way that they do so is to include more and more women in their parliamentary delegations.We are grateful to Natsu Matsuda for capable research assistance, to Torben Iversen for sharing data, and to Ethan Scheiner and Bing Powell for helpful comments as discussant for this paper at a panel at the 2004 American Political Science Association meetings in Chicago. Thies also acknowledges the support of a grant from the UCLA Academic Senate's Committee on Research.

Support for gender equality in the United States has gradually increased from the 1970s onward. Nonetheless, significant and varying gender gaps in this support become evident when we analyze public opinion over time and across generations. I utilize longitudinal survey data from national samples of three generations that came of age in the pre–women's movement era, during the era, and in the postmovement era, respectively. Three main indicators of attitudes about gender equality are employed and two types of gaps are formulated. Contemporaneous gender gaps—the differences between men and women at a given time—tended to increase over time and across succeeding generations. Longitudinal gaps, the differences in support between men and women across generations at different points in time, took the form of women becoming more liberal than men. Signs of growing resentment or ambivalence about gender equality among men appeared in the postmovement generation. A combination of generation and period effects accounts for these dynamics, the key factor being the interaction of gender with generational location and secular tides.The most recent support for the research reported here comes from the National Science Foundation and the Academic Senate of the University of California, Santa Barbara. I thank Lia Roberts and Kuang-hui Chen for their technical assistance. The data used here are available through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Dilemmas of Democracy Conference, Loyola Marymount University, 2003.

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.

Why develop a comparative politics of gender? As the critical perspectives in this section demonstrate, there are many answers to this question. I would like to focus here on two reasons: first, for gaining a deeper understanding of the operations of political institutions, and second, for explaining the relationship between these institutions and social actors, including those pursuing a gender equality agenda. To be specific, this essay argues not just for a comparative politics of gender but for a comparative politics of gender and institutions. The discussion focuses on the possibility of using neo-institutionalist theory, especially in relation to its normative and dynamic understanding of institutions, to gain a deeper understanding of the way that gender shapes political institutions and also, through interaction with social actors, including feminists, the way gender norms can be disrupted to open new spaces for these actors.

A comparative analysis of gender relations incorporates and goes beyond a “women and politics” approach by focusing on the organization of political life, illuminating the systematic way that social norms, laws, practices, and institutions advantage certain groups and forms of life and disadvantage others. In order to illuminate the various ways that women and men are advantaged and disadvantaged as women and men, gender analysis must incorporate analysis of race, class, sexuality, and other axes of disadvantage, and explore interactions among them. These axes are defined differently in different national contexts, and so examining variation across national borders illuminates the variety of social arrangements that are consistent with human biology: This type of analysis thereby denaturalizes and politicizes gender, racial/ethnic, and class relations (among others). The wide variety of modes and degrees of resistance to these forms of social organization, and success in challenging them, illuminate and inspire new strategies of resistance for people in other countries.

One of my most painful memories as a newly minted assistant professor was of giving a talk at a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meeting on democratization in Africa, during which senior Africanist political scientists (Americans) continued their private discussions while I tried to deliver a paper on women and democratization in Africa. My voice carried weakly over the din. I was too intent on getting through my prepared talk in the allotted time to do what I should have done, which was to stop until I got their full attention. I remember thinking at the time that I had something very important to say that they needed to hear, and they were missing this opportunity. That was 1994.

Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. By Cynthia Burack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2004. 203 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In the introduction to this book, Cynthia Burack articulates her self-identity as multiple and shifting—nonblack, feminist, and interested in working through questions of group identity for personal, political, and intellectual reasons (p. 4). She summarizes the relationship delineated by black feminist theorists themselves regarding group membership and the relative power of the interpreter's voice: “Black feminist theorists are themselves often scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They write of their own struggles…. They do not reject outright the possibility that non-group members can participate in group discourse as readers or interpreters. Rather, they hold that participation confers responsibilities: to listen respectfully to the voices of group members, to claim the grounds and consequences of one's own interests, methods, and perspectives; and to avoid Olympian forms of closure that end intellectual conversation” (p. 4).

Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. By Hannah E. Britton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. 198 pp. $35.00.

The women's movement in America tried but failed to have this language added to the U.S. Constitution: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping. Edited by Dyan Mazurana, Angela Raven-Roberts, and Jane Parpart. Lanham, MD, and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. 304 pp. $75.00 cloth, $31.95 paper.

Framed in the language of peace (making, keeping, building), the United Nations military interventions of the 1990s have spawned feminist demands for participation, together with critiques of the sexist and gendered practices that have characterized these missions. In Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping, 14 scholar-practitioners relay their observations of the way in which gender politics pervades UN peace missions and postconflict reconstruction.

Women's Political Discourse: A 21st Century Perspective. By Molly Mayhead and Brenda Devoe Marshall. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 2005. 304 pp. $75.00 cloth, $26.00 paper.

Political discourse has proven a worthy source of material for scholarly investigation into power, politics, and policymaking. Policy scholars have frequently used discourse to explore issue framing, media content, and policy decisions (e.g., Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, 1993; Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda Building, 1983; Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox, 1997; Nayda Terkildsen, Frauke I. Schnell, and Cristina Ling, “Interest Groups, the Media, and Policy Debate Formation: An Analysis of Message Structure, Rhetoric, and Source Cues,” Political Communication 15 [1998]: 45–61). As a tool for investigating abortion debates (e.g., Myra Marx Ferree, William Anthony Gamson, Jurgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht, Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the U.S., 2002) or sex education (e.g., Janice M. Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the U.S., 2002), discourse also reveals the gendered dimensions of contemporary American politics. At the same time, this insight is not lost on advocates and opinion leaders: “Words are … bullets” in the culture wars, says James Dobson, founder of the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family (quoted in Irvine 2002, 73).