Women and Leadership: New Challenges, Issues, and Methods

There has been a considerable global increase in women’s representation in political and decision-making offices over the past decades which goes hand in hand with an unprecedent increase of gender equality legislation and improvement of representation of women´s interests in decision-making. However, a closer inspection of some recent trends should prevent both gender and politics scholars and policy makers from resting on their laurels. Despite the growing numbers in descriptive representation of women, the gender inequality in political power remains unshaken (Celis and Lovenduski 2018), moreover the qualitative change in women’s representation and gender equality policy has not been a universal process which would happen evenly across all regions (Paxton, Hughes, and Barnes 2020). There has been ongoing violence against women in politics (Krook 2020) and in some countries, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, we have been witnessing a backsliding trend against gender equality policies and gender-related issues as such (Krizsan and Roggeband 2018). Recently, a new global crisis has emerged due to the COVID-19 pandemic and it is certainly about to have an extensive and long term social impact. We have already registered signals that the pandemic impacts women more negatively and severely than men (Andersen et al. 2020; Power 2020) which makes women’s voice in decision-making even more critical for an effective management of the crisis. This workshop intends to bring together scholars of gender and politics to discuss new research on different aspects of women’s representation across different political systems and contexts. First, we invite research on contemporary challenges to gender equality. Even though factors influencing women’s representation have been discussed for a long time, there is evidence that even in the twenty first century, women face bias against political female leadership (Setzler 2019) and gender stereotypes on the side of voters (Dolan and Lynch 2016) and political elites (Butler and Preece 2016). Women are still politically less engaged than men, despite increasing trends in descriptive representation (Wolak 2020). Research on current state of political, structural, psychological and other dimensions of women’s political representation which also impacts adoption of gender equality policy is invited to be presented and discussed at the workshop. Second, research on the recent development (both progressive and regressive) of adoption or reform of positive measures and other strategies designed to help increase representation of women in decision making positions as well as gender-equality policies is invited. Quota and other strategies are crucial factors of women’s representation (Dahlerup 2006; Krook and Norris 2014). While in some countries, political environment is more open to adoption of positive actions including quota (Dahlerup and Freidenvall 2005), other countries are reluctant to adopt “fast track” measures (Dubrow and Zabrezewska 2020). Topics related to positive action and quota in both public institutions and private corporations, the effectivity of positive action, as well as strategies of successful adoption of such measures are invited. The aim of the panel is to present and discuss up-to-date analyses of positive action measures and nomination strategies in various settings.