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80 books match the query 'Women in politics' and 10 start with g

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Gender Power, Leadership, and Governance

Georgia Duerst-Lahti and Rita Mae Kelly, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1995

This groundbreaking collection introduces the concept of gender power as a pervasive but overlooked force within institutions, particularly U.S. politics. It examines the ideological dimensions of masculinity-- masculinism --and its pervasive and reinforcing effects. The essays examine gender as a property of institutions, something with deep symbolic meaning, as well as an analytic category importantly distinctive from sex. Theoretically rich, Gender Power, Leadership and Governance contributes to understandings of power and leadership as it provides a new perspective on men, women, and their relationships to governance.Essays reveal the multiplicity of ways "compulsory masculinity" is imposed upon female leaders who wish to succeed in a man's world, and analyzes the use of interpersonal means to ensure masculine advantage. For example, only one woman in Congress was able to have a direct effect on any reproductive policy; other women experienced sexual harassment by offensive men, which resulted in their being distracted from performing as leaders.Until now, studies of gender within the field of political science have focused centrally on women. Men have been studied as gendered beings whose thinking has shaped politics in ways advantageous to them, but this volume is unique in crossing multiple levels of analysis and demonstrating the interactive and reinforcing effects of gender power. The book is required reading for political scientists who have frequently been blind to masculinist assumptions and cultural belief systems when gender roles collide with leadership demands for women. It will also appeal to those in public administration and policy, sociology, and business studies."An important book that challenges the ways empirical research is done and the ways social scientists think about gender."--Nancy Hartsock, University of Washington"A very useful book on gender and political leadership that weaves together scholarly research with practical applications and suggestions for change."--Virginia Sapiro, University of Wisconsin, Madison"A very ambitious book, attempting no less than a paradigm shift in social science thinking."--Marcia Lynn Whicker, Rutgers University

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Gender Quotas and Democratic Participation

Recruiting Candidates for Elective Offices in Germany

Louise K. Davidson-Schmich

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Since the 1970s, quotas for female political candidates in elections have proliferated worldwide. Beyond increasing the numbers of women in high-level elected bodies and, thereby, women’s political representation, advocates claim that quotas foster gender-equal participation in democracy and create female role models. According to this reasoning, quotas also overcome barriers to women’s political participation, especially discriminatory practices in the selection of electoral candidates. Though such claims have persuaded policy makers to adopt quotas, little empirical evidence exists to verify their effects.

In Gender Quotas and Democratic Participation, Louise K. Davidson-Schmich employs a pathbreaking research design to assess the effects of gender quotas on all phases of political recruitment. Drawing on interviews with, and an original survey of, potential candidates in Germany, she investigates the extent to which quotas and corresponding increases in women’s descriptive representation have resulted in similar percentages of men and women joining political parties, aspiring to elected office, pursuing ballot nominations, and securing selection as candidates. She also examines the effect of quotas on discriminatory selection procedures. Ultimately, Davidson-Schmich argues, quotas’ intended benefits have been only partially realized. Quotas give women greater presence in powerful elected bodies not by encouraging female citizens to pursue political office at rates similar to men’s, but by improving the odds that the limited number of politically ambitious women who do join parties will be elected. She concludes with concrete, original policy recommendations for increasing women’s political participation.

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Gender and Violence against Political Actors

Edited by Elin Bjarnegård and Pär Zetterberg

Temple University Press, 2023

There has been an increase in testimonies from women politicians who have been targets of violence and from survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. The editors and contributors to of Gender and Violence against Political Actors seek to understand how gender influences both physical and psychological forms of violence and how sexual violence affects both men and women.
Chapters focus on theoretical approaches demonstrating how different disciplinary starting points—e.g., politics, violence and gender—give rise to different lenses. Essays examine violence carried out during conflict and peacetime, and relate to the continuum of violence—physical, sexual, psychological, and online. In addition, six country case studies reveal how different types of political actors have been targets of violence.

Gender and Violence against Political Actors ends by providing various approaches to responding to the problem of gendered violence in politics while also evaluating policy responses.

Contributors: Kerryn Baker, Julie Ballington, Gabrielle Bardall, Gabriella Borovsky, Cheryl N. Collier, Sofia Collignon, Maria Eriksson Baaz, Eleonora Esposito, Nicole Haley, Rebekah Herrick, Sandra Håkansson, Roudabeh Kishi, Anne-Kathrin Kreft, Mona Lena Krook, Rebecca Kuperberg, Robert U. Nagel, Louise Olsson, Jennifer M. Piscopo, Tracey Raney, Juliana Restrepo Sanín, Paige Schneider, Maria Stern, Sue Thomas, and the editors

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Gender in Campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives

Barbara Burrell

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Barbara Burrell presents a comprehensive comparative examination of men's and women’s candidacies for the U.S. House of Representatives in elections from 1994 through 2012. Analyzing extensive data sets on all major party candidates for 10 elections—covering candidate status, party affiliation, fund-raising, candidate background variables, votes obtained, and success rates for both primary and general elections—Burrell finds little evidence of categorical discrimination against women candidates. Women compete equally with men and often outpace them in raising money, gaining interest group and political party support, and winning elections.

Yet the number of women elected to the U.S. House has expanded only incrementally. The electoral structure limits opportunities for newcomers to win congressional seats and there remains a lower presence of women in winnable contests despite growing recruitment efforts. Burrell suggests that congressional dysfunction discourages potential candidates from pursuing legislative careers and that ambitious women are finding alternative paths to influence and affect public policy.

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Gendered Pluralism

Belinda Robnett and Katherine Tate

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Focused on structural and political intersectionalities, Gendered Pluralism takes a broader approach to understanding the constellation of factors that drive gender and racial differences on an array of public policy issues. Belinda Robnett and Katherine Tate examine a broader set of actors absent the contextual factors that may drive them to compromise their opinions. Their study examines the ways in which (1) men and women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; (2) whites and racial-ethnic minorities differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; (3) women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; (4) African-American men and women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; and (5) African-American women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences.

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Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives

Edited by Jan Bender Shetler

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

Do African men and women think about and act out their ethnicity in different ways? Most studies of ethnicity in Africa consider men’s experiences, but rarely have scholars examined whether women have the same idea of what it means to be, for example, Igbo or Tswana or Kikuyu. Or, studies have invoked the adage “women have no tribe” to indicate a woman’s loss of ethnicity as she marries into her husband’s community. This volume engages directly the issue of women’s ethnicity and makes stimulating contributions to debates about how and why women’s movements have a unifying role in African political organization and peace movements.
Drawing on extensive field research in many different regions of Africa, the contributors demonstrate in their essays that women do make choices about the forms of ethnicity they embrace, creating alternatives to male-centered definitions—in some cases rejecting a specific ethnic identity in favor of an interethnic alliance, in others reinterpreting the meaning of ethnicity within gendered domains, and in others performing ethnic power in gendered ways. Their analysis helps explain why African women may be more likely to champion interethnic political movements while men often promote an ethnicity based on martial masculinity. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, linguists, and political scientists, Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives offers a diverse and timely look at a neglected but important topic.

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Girls of Liberty

The Struggle for Suffrage in Mandatory Palestine

Margalit Shilo

Brandeis University Press, 2016

Following the Balfour Declaration and the British conquest of Palestine (1917–1918), the small Jewish community that lived there wanted to establish an elected assembly as its representative body. The issue that hindered this aim was whether women would be part of it. A group of feminist Zionist women from all over the country created a political party that participated in the elections, even before women’s suffrage was enacted. This unique phenomenon in Mandatory Palestine resulted in the declaration of women’s equal rights in all aspects of life by the newly founded Assembly of Representatives. Margalit Shilo examines the story of these activists to elaborate on a wide range of issues, including the Zionist roots of feminism and nationalism; the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sector’s negation of women’s equality; how traditional Jewish concepts of women fashioned rabbinical attitudes on the question of women’s suffrage; and how the fight for women’s suffrage spread throughout the country. Using current gender theories, Shilo compares the Zionist suffrage struggle to contemporaneous struggles across the globe, and connects this nearly forgotten episode, absent from Israeli historiography, with the present situation of Israeli women. This rich analysis of women’s right to vote within this specific setting will appeal to scholars and students of Israel studies, and to feminist and social historians interested in how contexts change the ways in which activism is perceived and occurs.

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Good Reasons to Run

Women and Political Candidacy

Edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele

Temple University Press, 2020

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a large cohort of women emerged to run for office. Their efforts changed the landscape of candidates and representation. However, women are still far less likely than men to seek elective office, and face biases and obstacles in campaigns. (Women running for Congress make twice as many phone calls as men to raise the same contributions.)

The editors and contributors to Good Reasons to Run, a mix of scholars and practitioners, examine the reasons why women run—and do not run—for political office. They focus on the opportunities, policies, and structures that promote women’s candidacies. How do nonprofits help recruit and finance women as candidates? And what role does money play in women’s campaigns?

The essays in Good Reasons to Run ask not just who wants to run, but how to activate and encourage such ambition among a larger population of potential female candidates while also increasing the diversity of women running for office.

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Governance Feminism

An Introduction

Janet Halley

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Describing and assessing feminist inroads into the state

Feminists walk the halls of power. Governance Feminism: An Introduction shows how some feminists and feminist ideas—but by no means all—have entered into state and state-like power in recent years. Being a feminist can qualify you for a job in the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, the local prosecutor’s office, or the child welfare bureaucracy. Feminists have built institutions and participate in governance.

The authors argue that governance feminism is institutionally diverse and globally distributed. It emerges from grassroots activism as well as statutes and treaties, as crime control and as immanent bureaucracy. Conflicts among feminists—global North and South; left, center, and right—emerge as struggles over governance. This volume collects examples from the United States, Israel, India, and from transnational human rights law.

Governance feminism poses new challenges for feminists: How shall we assess our successes and failures? What responsibility do we shoulder for the outcomes of our work? For the compromises and strange bedfellows we took on along the way?

Can feminism foster a critique of its own successes? This volume offers a pathway to critical engagement with these pressing and significant questions.

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Governance Feminism

Notes from the Field

Janet Halley

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

An interdisciplinary, multifaceted look at feminist engagements with governance across the global North and global South

Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field brings together nineteen chapters from leading feminist scholars and activists to critically describe and assess contemporary feminist engagements with state and state-like power. Gathering examples from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, it complements and expands on the companion volume Governance Feminism: An Introduction. Its chapters argue that governance feminism (GF) is institutionally diverse and globally distributed—emerging from traditional sites of state power as well as from various forms of governance and operating at the grassroots level, in the private sector, in civil society, and in international relations.

The book begins by confronting the key role that crime and punishment play in GFeminist projects. Here, contributors explore the ideological and political conditions under which this branch of GF became so robust and rethink the carceral turn. Other chapters speak to another face of GFeminism: feminists finding, in mundane and seemingly unspectacular bureaucratic tools, leverage to bring about change in policy and governance practices. Several contributions highlight the political, strategic, and ethical challenges that feminists and LGBT activists must negotiate to play on the governmental field. The book concludes with a focus on feminist interventions in postcolonial legal and political orders, looking at new policy spaces opened up by conflict, postconflict, and occupation.

Providing a clear, cross-cutting, critical lens through which to map developments in feminist governance around the world, Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field makes sense of the costs and benefits of current feminist realities to reimagine feminist futures.

Contributors: Libby Adler, Northeastern U; Aziza Ahmed, Northeastern U; Elizabeth Bernstein, Barnard College; Amy J. Cohen, Ohio State U; Karen Engle, U of Texas at Austin; Jacob Gersen, Harvard U; Leigh Goodmark, U of Maryland; Aeyal Gross, Tel Aviv U; Aya Gruber, U of Colorado, Boulder; Janet Halley, Harvard U; Rema Hammami, Birzeit U, Palestine; Vanja Hamzić, U of London; Isabel Cristina Jaramillo-Sierra; Prabha Kotiswaran, King’s College London; Maleiha Malik, King’s College London; Vasuki Nesiah, New York U; Dianne Otto, Melbourne Law School; Helen Reece; Darren Rosenblum, Pace U; Jeannie Suk Gersen, Harvard U; Mariana Valverde, U of Toronto.

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