Women in leadership in the party: Women’s representation in intra-party leadership and party positions on gender equality in employment
Abstract
Labour policies have large impacts on gender equality in the workplace. While political parties play critical roles in policy making, it remains unclear if party-level women’s representation impacts labour policies. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between women’s representation in intra-party leadership and party policy positions on gender equality in employment. The analyses of 1,955 political parties in 169 countries from 1970 to 2019 find that a higher proportion of women in intra-party leadership results in the party taking stances more likely to favor gender equality in employment. Even among the parties we would expect to be the least women-friendly, a greater representation of women in intra-party leadership has positive influence. More women in leadership means stronger party support for gender equality regardless of ideological party placement. Furthermore, the findings also suggest that women party leaders have greater impacts on labour policies when a party leadership has greater decision-making power.
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
References
Aldrich AS (2020) Party organization and gender in European elections. Party Politics 26(5): 675–688.
Atchison A (2015) The impact of female cabinet ministers on a female-friendly labor environment. Journal of Women, Politics and Policy 36(4): 388–414.
Atchison A, Ian Down (2009) Women cabinet ministers and female-friendly social policy. Poverty and Public Policy 1(2): 1–23.
Carey JM, Soberg Shugart M (1995) Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: a rank ordering of electoral formulas. Electoral Studies 14(4): 417–439.
Caul M (1999) Women’s representation in parliament: the role of political parties. Party Politics 5(1): 79–98.
Ceron A (2012) Bounded oligarchy: how and when factions constrain leaders in party position-taking. Electoral Studies 31(4): 689–701.
Charlesworth S, Macdonald F (2017) Employment regulation and worker-carers: reproducing gender inequality in the domestic and market spheres? In: Peetz D, Murray G (eds), Women, Labor Segmentation and Regulation: Varieties of Gender Gaps. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. 79–96.
Cheng C, Tavits M (2011) Informal influences in selecting female political candidates. Political Research Quarterly 64(2): 460–471.
Childs Sarah, Krook Mona Lena (2008) Critical mass theory and women’s political representation. Political studies 56(3): 725–736.
Coppedge M, Gerring J, Knutsen CH, et al. (2020) “V-dem methodology V10”. Varieties of Democracy (V–Dem) Project. Available at: https://www.v-dem.net/data/reference-documents/.
Cross WP, Pruysers S (2019) The local determinants of representation: party constituency associations, candidate nomination and gender. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne De Science Politique 52(3): 557–574.
Crowder-Meyer M (2013) Gendered recruitment without trying: how local party recruiters affect women’s representation. Politics and Gender 9(4): 390–413.
Dovi S (2002) Preferable descriptive representation: will just any woman, black, or latino do? American Political Science Review 96(4): 729–743.
Ennser-Jedenastik L (2017) How women’s political representation affects spending on family benefits. Journal of Social Policy 46(3): 563–581.
Espirito-Santo A, Freire A, Serra-Silva S (2020) Does women’s descriptive representation matter for policy preferences? The role of political parties. Party Politics 26(2): 227–237.
Funk KD, Luis Molina A (2022) Closing the gap: how mayors’ individual attributes affect gender wage disparities in local bureaucracies. Review of Public Personnel Administration 42(3): 553–573.
Funk KD, Silva T, Escobar-Lemmon MC (2019) Leading toward equality: the effect of women mayors on gender equality in local bureaucracies. Politics, Groups, and Identities 7(3): 554–573.
Greene Z, O’Brien DZ (2016) Diverse parties, diverse agendas? Female politicians and the parliamentary party’s role in platform formation. European Journal of Political Research 55: 435–453.
Hazan RY (2003) Introduction. Journal of Legislative Studies 9(4): 1–11.
Hazan RY, Rahat G (2010) Democracy within Parties: Candidate Selection Methods and Their Political Consequences. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Itzkovitch-Malka R, Hazan RY (2017) Unpacking party unity: the combined effects of electoral systems and candidate selection methods on legislative attitudes and behavioural norms. Political Studies 65(2): 452–474.
Katz Richard, Mair Peter (1993) The Evolution of Party Organizations in Europe: The Three Faces of Party Organization. American Review of Politics 14(4): 593–617.
Kim NK (2022) When does women’s political power matter? Women’s representation and legal gender equality of economic opportunity across contexts. European Political Science Review 14(4): 583–599.
Kittilson MC (2006) Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.
Kittilson MC (2008) Representing women: the adoption of family leave in comparative perspective. The Journal of Politics 70(2): 323–334.
Kittilson MC (2011) Women, parties and platforms in post-industrial democracies. Party Politics 17(1): 66–92.
Kroeber Corinna (2022) How Parties Led by a Woman Redefine Their Positions: Empirical Evidence for Women’s Green, Alternative and Libertarian Agenda. European Journal of Political Research 61(1): 175–193.
Krook Mona Lena (2009) Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Reform Worldwide. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Kunovich S, Paxton P (2005) Pathways to power: the role of political parties in women’s national political representation. American Journal of Sociology 111(2): 505–552.
Luhrmann A, Dupont N, Higashijima M, et al. (2020a) Varieties of party identity and organization (V–party) dataset V1. Varieties of democracy (V-Dem) project. Available at: https://www.v-dem.net/data/v-party-dataset/.
Luhrmann A, Dupont N, Higashijima M, et al. (2020b) Codebook varieties of party identity and organisation (V-Party) V1” varieties of democracy (V–Dem) project. Available at: https://www.v-dem.net/data/v-party-dataset/.
Luhrmann A, Dupont N, Higashijima M, et al. (2020c) “V–dem party coding units V1” varieties of democracy (V–Dem) project. Available at: https://www.v-dem.net/data/v-party-dataset/.
Mansbridge J (1999) Should blacks represent blacks and women represent women? A contingent ‘yes. The Journal of Politics 61(3): 628–657.
Norris P (2019) The global party survey V1.0. www.GlobalPartySurvey.org.
Norris Pippa, Lovenduski Joni (1995) Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Obler Jeffrey (1973) The Role of National Party Leaders in the Selection of Parliamentary Candidates: the Belgian Case. Comparative Politics 5(2): 158–184.
O’Reilly J, Smith M, Simon D, et al. (2015) Equal pay as a moving target: international perspectives on forty-years of addressing the gender pay gap. Cambridge Journal of Economics 39(2): 299–317.
Paxton P, Hughes MM (2015) The increasing effectiveness of national gender quotas, 1990-2010. Legislative Studies Quarterly 40(3): 331–362.
Paxton P, Hughes MM, Barnes TD (2014) Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications.
Pemstein D, Marquardt KL, Tselgov E, et al. (2020) The V–dem measurement model: latent variable analysis for cross–national and cross–temporal expert–coded data. V–Dem Working Paper No. 21. 5th edition. Gothenburg, Sweden: University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.
Phillips A (1998) “Democracy and representation: or, why should it matter who our representatives are?” Chap. In: Phillips A (ed), 10 in Feminism and Politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Rahat G, Hazan RY, Katz RS (2008) Democracy and political parties: on the uneasy relationships between participation, competition and representation. Party Politics 14(6): 663–683.
Ray R, Gornick JC, Schmitt J (2010) Who cares? Assessing generosity and gender equality in parental leave policy designs in 21 countries. Journal of European Social Policy 20(3): 196–216.
Schumacher G, Giger N (2018) Do leadership-dominated parties change more? Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties 28(3): 349–360.
Schumacher G, Catherine E, de Vries, et al. (2013) Why do parties change position? Party organization and environmental incentives. The Journal of Politics 75(2): 464–477.
Sundstrom A, Daniel Stockemer (2022) Political party characteristics and women’s representation: the case of the European parliament. Representation 58(1): 119–137.
Tavits M (2011) Power within parties: the strength of the local party and MP independence in postcommunist Europe. American Journal of Political Science 55(4): 923–936.
Tavits M (2012a) Organizing for success: party organizational strength and electoral performance in postcommunist Europe. The Journal of Politics 74(1): 83–97.
Tavits M (2012b) Party organizational strength and party unity in post-communist Europe. European Political Science Review 4(3): 409–431.
Teorell J (1999) A deliberative defence of intra-party democracy. Party Politics 5(3): 363–382.
United Nations (2022) Closing gender pay gaps is more important than ever. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/09/1126901 (accessed 2 February 2023).
Weeks AC (2018) Why are gender quota laws adopted by men? The role of inter-and intraparty competition. Comparative Political Studies 51(4): 1935–1973.
Wuttke A, Jungherr A, Schoen H (2019). “More than opinion expression: secondary effects of intraparty referendums on party members.” Party Politics 25(6): 817–827.
Biographies
Nicole Purcell is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on intra-party heterogeneity, as well as party and elite behavior.
Haruka Nagao is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Oklahoma State University. Her/their research focuses on Chinese politics, health politics, gender and politics.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
Cite
Cite
Cite
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: August 17, 2023
Issue published: November 2024
Keywords
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Publication usage*
Total views and downloads: 829
*Publication usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Publications citing this one
Receive email alerts when this publication is cited
Web of Science: 0
Crossref: 1
- Explaining the Narrowing Gender Gap in Partisan Participation: Women’s Empowerment or Men’s Disengagement?
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
I am signed in as:
View my profileSign out
I can access personal subscriptions, purchases, paired institutional access and free tools such as favourite journals, email alerts and saved searches.
loading institutional access options
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
