The participation of women in politics has constituted the subject of numerous debates over the past years. An obvious example of the importance given by the EU as a global actor and normative power to promoting women in politics is Baroness Ashton, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union since the 1st of December 2009 when the post was created and also the First-Vice-President of the European Commission (since February 2010). Nevertheless, women representation in Central and East European member states remains one of the lowest in the EU. In Romania, the overall percentage is 9%, according to statistics issued by the Commission . Although legislation respects the community aquis, Romanian politics is still a masculine area, where feminine occurrences in decision-making positions are scarce and benefit from little support on behalf of their parties, the media or the public. Under these circumstances, the research I submit to your review focuses on the representation of women in the Romanian cabinets between 1990-2010. The analysis is based both on quantitative research methods as statistics and surveys revealing the number of women who were appointed ministers during this period, and on qualitative research – press monitoring and discourse analysis on media coverage of 3 of these ministers: Elena Udrea, Monica Macovei and Mona Musca. Given the importance clearly stated by the European Union policies to the gender equality theme, I dare to say that the topic is strangely quite absent from present researches in Romania. In fact, when approached, the debate is limited to a feminist or gender sensitive discourse instead of political or sociological analysis. That is why I hope you will find my research to be timely and of great interest on an multidisciplinary level: internal communication, gender studies and sociology.
