This paper addresses some of the conceptual and methodological issues facing scholars who wish to analyse the recruitment, roles, and impact of women in executive office (both cabinet and chief executive). Because most of the existing scholarship on women’s representation in political institutions focuses on the legislative branch, scholars studying women in executive office lack conceptual tools to orient their research. This is potentially problematic given the importance of shared and stable concepts for the accumulation of knowledge within a research community. Global trends make this endeavour important: women have reached chief executive office in countries like Brazil, Chile, Liberia, and Germany and many more countries, such as Spain, Bolivia, and South Africa, have approached gender parity in their cabinets. As such, more scholarly attention is being paid to the impact of these developments. My paper will use the case studies of Spain, where there has been a parity cabinet since 2004, and Chile, which had a female president from 2006 to 2010, to outline the ways that scholars can study the role and impact of women in executive office. A central goal of the paper is to show that executive office is fundamentally different from legislative office, requiring gender and politics scholars to ask different sorts of questions and perhaps abandon earlier assumptions about the policy impact that women in politics can have in different political arenas.
