This article offers an innovative way of understanding gender balance in parliaments. Motivated by research documenting how newcomers are disadvantaged during their first term in office, while senior members enjoy certain privileges, we want to find out how common women are among senior members of parliaments. We launch an institutional approach comprising three seniority measures to study gender gaps in political endurance to find out whether, where, and when men are more likely than women to be parliamentary seniors. Our analysis using data from seven countries in Western Europe and two countries in North America (1965–2020) shows very high gender gaps across the three measures. Thus, despite an increased level of female representation, women still constitute a small part of the exclusive group of senior members of parliament. Our findings extend the research documenting that women and men largely have equally long parliamentary careers, emphasizing the need to understand gender balance in multidimensional terms.

To advocate for restrictive immigration policies, conservative U.S. politicians have advanced a narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against White women. This framing of immigrant threat builds on a long history of similar anti-Black discourse and activates racialized ideas about protecting femininity. I demonstrate how the identities of purported victims of immigrant crime connect attitudes about immigration with benevolent sexism—a superficially positive, protective attitude toward particular types of women. An original survey experiment shows that benevolent sexism is activated when victims of immigrant crime are White women. Using nationally representative survey data, I show that the benevolent face of sexism has a notable impact on the immigration attitudes of White Americans, particularly when it comes to the protectionist policy of policing of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Female attorneys at the U.S. Supreme Court are less successful than male attorneys under some conditions because of gender norms, implicit expectations about how men and women should act. While previous work has found that women are more successful when they use more emotional language at oral arguments, gender norms are context sensitive. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted perhaps the most radical contextual shift in Supreme Court history: freewheeling in-person arguments were replaced with turn-based teleconference arguments. This change altered judicial decision-making and, I argue, justices’ assessments of attorneys’ gender performance. Using quantitative textual analysis of oral arguments, I demonstrate that justices implicitly evaluate gender performance with different metrics in each modality. Gender-normative levels of emotional language predict success in both formats. Function words, however, only predict success in teleconference arguments. Given gender’s salience at the Supreme Court and in broader society, my findings prompt questions about the extent to which women can substantively impact case law.

Bringing home federal spending projects to the district is a common reelection strategy for members of the U.S. Congress, and congresswomen tend to outperform congressmen in securing district spending. However, for legislators to turn distributive benefits into higher approval and electoral rewards, constituents must recognize that public spending has taken place in their community and attribute credit to the correct public official. I theorize that congresswomen face a gender bias when claiming credit for federal projects, and I test this theory through an online survey experiment. Contrary to expectations, I find no evidence that legislator gender influences the public’s reaction to congressional credit claims, indicating that congresswomen can effectively use distributive politics to counter gendered vulnerability in the U.S. Congress. This research advances the literature on gender and politics by investigating whether a gender bias in credit claiming prevents congresswomen from turning their representational efforts into electoral capital.

Systems of state decorations have often been overlooked by political scientists. However, they are highly indicative of dominant social norms and power differentials. While historical research has highlighted gender disparities in award bestowals in individual countries, comparative perspectives and cross-national analyses are still missing. This article provides the most comprehensive comparative analysis of the gender gap in state decorations. Using an original data set of all 11,559 recipients of civil awards in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from 1994 to 2020, it shows that women received significantly fewer awards than men across the three countries, with only moderate progress over time. Even where women and men were recognized in equal numbers, women remained underrepresented among higher classes of awards and were more likely to be recognized for achievements in stereotypically feminine fields. Our findings contribute to research on gendered institutions and highlight the usefulness of award bestowals as an indicator of sociopolitical phenomena.

We examine cultural and ideological barriers to gender equality in a young democracy, Indonesia, where women’s political representation has increased slowly since democratization, but where survey results point to declining support for women’s political leadership. In both country and comparative literature, the effect of ideological factors—including religion—on voter support for women candidates is contested. Using results of a nationally representative survey, we group respondents according to a “political patriarchy” index. We find that being a Muslim is a strong predictor of holding patriarchal attitudes; university education is associated with gender-egalitarian views. Patriarchal views, in turn, are associated with opposition to increasing Indonesia’s gender quota and with lower levels of self-reported voting for female candidates. Our findings suggest that patriarchal attitudes drive both policy preferences and voter behavior. We conclude that Indonesia’s recent conservative Islamic turn likely underpins widespread—and increasing—opposition to gender equality in politics.

We apply an intersectional framework to explore how connections to marginalized communities interact with candidate demographics to shape vote choice in U.S. politics. In an original experiment manipulating candidates’ race, gender, sexuality, and endorsements, we show that endorsements by organizations advocating for marginalized communities shape voter evaluations to the same, if not greater, degree as candidate demographics. Moreover, the effects are particularly pronounced for candidates receiving an endorsement from an LGBT advocacy organization. Attitudes toward marginalized communities are mapped onto candidates with ties to those communities, whether the candidate is a member or not; we call this process associational affect. Identity has a complex role in shaping vote choice, and, absent an investigation of power and interlocking social hierarchies, it alone is insufficient to explain vote choice.

The gender and politics literature offers diverse views on the causes of gendered practices and the best methodologies for studying them. This article advances efforts to take stock of and systematize this diversity by grounding the feminist institutionalist perspective in critical realism. The article posits that gendered institutions are real entities with independent powers, while also emphasizing the crucial role that human ideas play in upholding and contesting gendered practices. To faithfully capture gendered institutions and their relationship with human agency, the article promotes the use of the abductive-retroductive research design. This approach allows feminist institutionalist scholars to construct and test multiple competing theories about gendered institutions, drawing from various empirical manifestations of institutional power. These expressions range from observable actions to codified rules, socially shared norms, and other subtle discourses. By shedding light on the principles at the heart of realist-oriented feminist research, this work paves the way for a more standardized and transparent approach to feminist inquiries.

In recent years, struggles for justice, peace, and democracy around the world have been articulated through protests. Whether in Iran, Nigeria, Poland, Senegal, Tunisia, or the United States, this form of political participation challenges the status quo. Rising forms of autocratic rule, democratic backsliding, and right-wing populism underscore the urgency of protesters’ demands. Often overlooked in mainstream accounts, however, is the role of feminists in driving forward liberatory demands for new social contracts (Sen and Durano 2014). One recent example of this is the role that the Feminist Coalition played in the Nigerian #EndSARS protests, mobilizing against years of police brutality and impunity (Nwakanma 2022). Confronted with physical harm and even death, these feminists and their fellow protesters have strategized and theorized a vision for a better world (Nazneen and Okech 2021; Tamale 2020).

Feminists protesting gender-based violence and state violence have been instrumental to contesting the status quo and the shifting discourses, modes of organizing, and registers of protest in Senegal. Some 40 years after the emergence of Yewwu Yewwi, a major feminist movement, Senegalese feminists have returned to radical feminist organizing, despite increasing anti-gender backlash. In this essay, I draw on interviews with feminist activists and politicians between 2013 and 2022 to analyze the March 2021 protests in Senegal in light of previous protests. I argue that the intertwined dynamics of class, gender, and generation are critical to understanding the protests. I do this following the example of some feminist academics who have used intersectionality as a method, theory, and research agenda (Collins and Bilge 2016; Mohammed 2022). Innovations in protest strategies have allowed activists to overcome generational and ideological divides between feminist and women’s rights organizations, as well as within feminist movements, and to resist strategic alliances between patriarchal and political powers.

This essay historicizes feminist protests in Kenya over the last decade to examine the changing patterns of protest action and how they illustrate the evolution of both feminist discourses and sites within which these debates are animated. I look beyond the streets and direct action as the epitome of protest action to examine strategic litigation, hashtag activism, and national campaigns as important ways through which feminist protest can be understood in Kenya, focusing on three recent cases.

On August 6, 2016, the week of the South African public holiday Women’s Day, an extraordinary protest held the nation spellbound. Then president Jacob Zuma was announcing the results of local government elections live on national television when four young women walked out of the throng of election officials and politicians. They stood in front of the president, silent but visible on the televised screen. They held up placards: “I am 1 in 3,” “Ten Years Later,” “Khanga,” “Remember Khwezi.” Although the protesters stood for the duration of the broadcast, they were forcibly removed by security agents immediately after Zuma left the stage and the cameras moved offscreen. Hustled to the back of the room, they were lambasted by senior women leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) for their “inappropriate” action. This was a spectacular demonstration: silent and nonviolent, its tactics and timing pierced the performance of presidential authority and made visible a new form of feminism.

Women were at the forefront of the popular uprising that overthrew Sudan’s dictator, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019 (Al-Nagar and Tønnessen 2021). In the aftermath of the uprising, different forms of feminist mobilization emerged. Based on interviews conducted in Sudan in early 2022, we argue that this feminist mobilization was sparked by the backlash facing women during and after what is popularly known as the “December revolution.”1

For decades, African women have participated in the Black feminist struggle for women’s rights and racial, social, economic, and political justice (Collins 2017; Tamale 2020). In the 1950s, during the fight for independence across the continent, a radical and transnational feminist movement emerged with African women’s protests to “crack the norms of gender and colonial order” (Ndengue 2016) in both urban and rural postcolonial contexts (Falola and Paddock 2011; Mougoué 2019; Nchoji Nkwi 1985; Ndengue 2018). Protests have transnational effects (Johnson-Odim 2009; Terretta 2013). Today, transnationalism relies on social media platforms as sites of calls to action. They constitute alternative public spaces for expression and activism in constrained political environments (Ngono 2018) and platforms that facilitate informal transnational connections. These transnational connections are accompanied by explicit and assertive claims of feminism by a growing number of (young) women.