Global trends in gendered portfolio allocations in the face of climate change

The past half-century of political scholarship has given rise to a wealth of literature addressing the forces and impacts inherent in women’s progressive integration into politics. A small but valuable subset of this scholarship has argued that the distinctive nature of ministerial appointments (as opposed to elected offices) renders political cabinets a particularly salient area for the study of institutional dynamics related to women’s political representation. This work contends that cabinets can lend fresh insight into now-familiar questions around representation: who are appointees meant to represent; what do their appointments suggest about their expected skills or behavior; and what implications can be discerned based on associations made between particular identities and appointments? In this paper, I suggest that the gender-ministry nexus is particularly relevant for the study of recent evolutions in climate politics. While governments have traditionally assigned women to “feminine” and low-prestige portfolios (Krook & O’Brien 2012), the environment—although still dominated by men—is one rare policy are that has become increasingly accessible to women. Meanwhile, women are still largely absent from ministries considered crucial to effective climate mitigation strategies. In order to explore this paradox, I mobilize data from the WhoGov dataset (Nyrup & Bramwell 2020). Spanning across 40 years and 177 countries, WhoGov is the first dataset of its kind to disaggregate gender data for executive portfolio allocations. It proposes a fertile terrain for exploring issues related to gendered power distribution in executive politics, revealing global trends at the intersection of policymaking, gender, and climate change.