Women in Female-Led Executives: The Meloni Cabinet in Comparative Perspective

Giorgia Meloni is the first woman to be appointed prime minister in Italy, leading a cabinet where most of the ministers are men. In this regard, the specialized literature shows that female ministers are consequential for the symbolic representation of women, but there is mixed evidence about the impact of a female head of government on the promotion (or demotion) of women in top ministerial positions. While some scholars argue that women – albeit with caveats – promote female representation, other scholars find that there is little or even negative effect. These studies compare women and men, yet there is very little knowledge about differences among female-led cabinets. Therefore, this paper aims to study the Meloni cabinet from a gender-based comparative perspective. Has Giorgia Meloni promoted women? Is her cabinet different from other female-led cabinets? To what extent and why? After introducing the theory, the paper compares the Meloni cabinet with general patterns of ministerial appointments in female-led cabinets. In a further step, a regression analysis explains variance between all female-led cabinets in Europe. Promotion is operationalized in a two-fold way: as percentage of female ministers and as percentage of women holding a high prestige portfolio. The key explanatory factors are the ideology of the PM’s party, the right-wing leanings of the government as a whole, as well as the ‘newness’ of the PM’s party. We control for several variables, such as time, women in parliament, levels of gender equality in the society, and the partisan profile of the cabinet. The analysis covers European countries from 1999 to 2023.