Significant progress has been made in understanding the causes of variation in gender equality across countries. But just as national indicators of democracy can obscure important sub-national variation, national indicators of gender equality can also obscure important variation. In fact, in many countries there is significant variation across sub-national units in the status of women. In many federal systems, many of the most important public policies regulating gender relations are determined by state and local governments. The purpose of this paper is to examine how subnational variation in gender equality policy affects the conceptualization and theorizing of gender politics in Latin America’s federal systems.
