The Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) served as the agency’s lead responsible for implementing the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Act of 2017 and the 2023 U.S. Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security. Tazreen Hussain (TH) served as the USAID Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor from 2024 to 2025. In early 2025, the Donald Trump administration officially shut down USAID, including the women, peace, and security portfolio. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on December 12, 2025.
Kamala Harris, a first multi-racial Black woman, became the official Democratic presidential nominee on August 5, 2025. This historic achievement only amplified the intensity of discussions about Black women’s politics in the United States. As Black feminist political scientists studying Black women’s politics, we knew we needed to document the nuance, dynamism, and historical nature of Harris’s campaign. We were keenly aware that we needed to capture the narratives of Black women voters to fully make sense of this historic moment. The media narrative that Black women were excited about Harris’s nomination (Jones 2024; Walker 2024) and scholarly findings that Black women voters preferred Black women candidates (Brown et al. 2019; Philpot and Walton, Jr. 2007) seemed superficial. We believed that beneath Black women’s support for Harris lay a particularized set of emotions and wide variation in candidate evaluations, which are underexplored because Black women consistently vote Democratic and are the demographic group most likely to support Black women candidates. These varied emotive responses lead to the same political behavior: a vote for Harris. Our research examines how Black women feel about politics and how these emotions translate into political action.
Abstract How and why does left solidarity fail women of color? Given the rising tide of far right extremism, this is an urgent question for social movement actors who wish to build sustainable coalitions for progressive politics. In this paper, we examine the dynamics of solidarity via a novel approach to the study of “atmospheres.” While scholars of emotions have identified the importance of atmospheres in social and political life, they are unable to answer their own important question: What do atmospheres make possible politically? We bring together the concept of racialized solidarity with the sensuous inequalities of activist spaces. We identify visual, sonic, somatic, and emotional inequalities that work together to produce what we name as the racialized atmospherics of activist spaces, in which the mood is systematically mobilized against women of color.
What does violence against women in politics (VAWIP) look like in authoritarian regimes that are widely portrayed as stable and "peaceful"? Existing scholarship largely centers on democracies, leaving nondemocratic contexts understudied. This article addresses the gap by examining Kuwait, the Gulf's most democratic monarchy, where women's educational and professional gains are highlighted even as political contestation remains tightly controlled. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, and activists, we theorize VAWIP as a core mechanism of women's exclusion, enabled by the collusion of hollow formal institutions and patriarchal kinship networks. In this patriarchal peace, overt physical repression is rare, but women are governed through psychological harassment, semiotic attacks, and economic pressure that constrain their resources, competence, and visibility. Conversely, male respondents report low-risk political careers. Our analysis extends VAWIP research beyond democracies, generating hypotheses on how regime type and kin-based networks shape nonphysical coercion in ostensibly peaceful authoritarian regimes.
In August 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) issued the first-ever ruling from an international tribunal about the right to care. In Consultative Opinion 31, the IACHR affirmed three dimensions to care as a human right: the right to be cared for, the right to give care, and the right to self-care. The IACHR established that care constitutes a "universal human necessity and an indispensable condition for enjoying dignified existence" and that care, as a human right, sustains other human rights, like the right to health (IACHR 2025a). The IACHR further expressed concern about the unequal distribution of care burdens and called upon governments to establish measures that would advance the human right to care based on "social and familial co-responsibility & mldr; and the principles of equality and non-discrimination" (IACHR 2025a). The ruling profoundly reconceptualizes care's normative and practical dimensions. If care is a human right with shared responsibility underlying its realization, then governments are obligated to provide care. Care becomes a public good that can be demanded, rather than a private cost that (mostly women) must bear.
The Abortion Counseling Service, a U.S. feminist organization better known as Jane, provided safe, affordable abortions to 12,000 women in Chicago during the pre-Roe era (1969-1973). Remarkably, beginning in 1970, its members, women and non-medical professionals, clandestinely performed the abortions themselves. Yet the group's distinctive practice of political dissidence has not been carefully theorized. The article argues that Jane's efforts were exemplary of anarchic direct action and feminist mutual aid. Their approach involved action that was "direct" in the specific sense of being unmediated and reflexive in character. Jane also enacted key mutual aid principles in their attempts to construct a community of care governed by relations of solidarity rather than charity. This account of how Jane "took" the right to abortion opens up a way of thinking about feminist organizing for reproductive justice that focuses on meeting immediate needs rather than seeking legislative change.
In recent decades, populist mobilization has significantly reshaped the European political landscape. Right-wing populist parties have been particularly influential in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe, where they have frequently served in executive cabinet appointments. Drawing on an original data set covering cabinet composition in 12 countries from 1992 to 2019, this study investigates whether radical right-wing and populist governments are as likely as their mainstream counterparts to appoint women to cabinet positions. The findings reveal that radical right parties in government significantly reduce the likelihood of appointing women to cabinet positions, while populist parties don't have the same effect. Moreover, the degree of populism within governing parties substantially magnifies the exclusion of women from the executive. These results offer new insight into the complexities of populism in the region and its implications for women's descriptive representation in the executive branch.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) at the United States Department of State focuses on the interlocking issues of democracy, human rights, and workers’ rights. It is also responsible for producing annual reports on the state of human rights in countries around the world. During the administration of Joe Biden, Tambria Schroeder (TS) was the Gender Equality Policy Advisor, and Andrea Gillespie (AG) served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons and in the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs. This is an edited and compiled version of interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 8, 2026, and January 27, 2026.
In the United States, women who work full-time earn substantially less than their male colleagues. The gap is even larger for intersectionally marginalized women, including women with disabilities, Black and Latina women, women with children, middle-aged women, and LGBTQ+ women. These patterns suggest that closing the wage gap will be impossible unless we consider how intersectionally marginalized women fare under US equal pay laws. Building on foundational work on the intersectional failings of US anti-discrimination laws, we provide the first large N-analysis of how women who file equal pay cases based on gender and one or more of their intersecting identities based on ability status, age, race, nationality, pregnancy, and/or sexual orientation fare in court. The analysis of 1,135 equal pay cases from 2000 to 2021 shows women who file intersectional equal pay cases are significantly less likely to win than women who file equal pay cases based on gender alone.
How are feminized identities used to further the participation of Women in far-right populist movements? We examine this question by exploring the appropriation of #SavetheChildren by the far-right group, QAnon. We employ competing narratives of QAnon child trafficking campaign materials and those of Polaris, the largest anti-trafficking NGO in the United States, in an original survey of respondents to examine public responses to QAnon's use of gendered stereotypes that tie women to motherhood and maternal duty. Our results illustrate the syncretic nature of QAnon and the complex reality of gender stereotypes. We find that motherhood and child protection narratives by QAnon do not mobilize women better than NGOs. However, QAnon narratives appear to be at least as good at mobilizing as NGO narratives and do so for the same groups. Further work in this area is crucial to understanding the complex relationship between gender and the rise of QAnon.
Care and social reproduction are two prominent feminist frameworks for analyzing women's oppression and envisioning emancipatory paths. Although they are sometimes used interchangeably, they have emerged from different intellectual traditions. Different strands of social reproduction theory move within a common Marxist tradition of anti-capitalist critique, while research on care has not developed as a unified field but rather along several parallel strands (Ciccia 2025; Fine 2007). These different orientations are often overlooked, leading to considerable misunderstandings of scholarship on care. Additionally, care is often viewed as occupying an uncomfortable position within contemporary feminisms due to its presumed association with mothering (Robinson 2015; Sevenhuijsen 1998) and white women (Davis 1981; Nadasen 2021; Raghuram 2016). Because of these complexities, the relationship between social reproduction and care remains contested, particularly when it comes to their ability to embrace divisions among women and understand the social organization of care as shaped by intersecting hierarchies of gender, class, race, nation, sexuality, ability, and age.
The Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established during the first administration of Barack Obama to coordinate gender equality policy and programs across USAID bureaus and missions. Susan Markham (SM) was appointed Senior Coordinator during the second Obama administration, 2014-2017, while Jamille Bigio (JB) served in this role during the administration of President Joe Biden, 2021-2025. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on March 23, 2026.
In a profession designed for men with housewives, academic mothers continue to shoulder a disproportionate burden. Motherhood penalties in academia are well-documented, with research consistently showing negative impacts on mothers' publication rates (Di Leo et al. n.d.; Lutter and Schr & ouml;der 2020; Morgan et al. 2021), citations (Lawson et al. 2021), and promotion trajectories (Antecol et al. 2018; Finkel and Olswang 1996; Mason et al. 2019) - effects not observed among fathers. In recent years, both institutional frameworks and grassroots movements have sought to address these inequities, yet their strategies and impacts differ significantly.
When most of the world's parliaments were created, women could not vote or be elected. Correspondingly, parliaments' rules and infrastructure as well expectations of parliamentarians' (MPs) performance were designed around masculine standards, including the assumption that MPs had no caretaking responsibilities. Scholars seeking explanations for women's underrepresentation argue that parliaments remain unwelcoming to those with caretaking roles. As long as women continue to bear disproportionate household obligations, increasing women's presence in elected office requires parliaments to adopt reforms to accommodate parents. We surveyed members of Germany's national and state parliaments about their attitudes towards parenthood and politics and support for various parenthood accommodations. We find that gender rather than being a parent shapes how politicians perceive the challenge of reconciling politics and parenthood. But shared experiences among women do not automatically produce similar attitudes about policies to make parliaments family friendly. Party ideology and gender both predict support for parliamentary reforms.
In 2022, Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d'Italia-FdI) and Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National-RN) achieved historically significant electoral results, cementing their position as female leaders of the populist radical right. This paper examines how these figures perform and frame gender-related issues, which is still an understudied topic. Through a qualitative discourse analysis of their TikTok and Twitter content, we argue that Meloni and Le Pen exemplify strongwomen, which we innovatively construct as an extension of the notion of strongmen, through the incorporation of hegemonic femininity, and stereotypical feminine elements. Indeed, Meloni and Le Pen balance stereotypical femininity-advocating for women's rights and exhibiting a nurturing attitude-with the strongmen traits of toughness and assertiveness, displayed towards the promotion of the family and natality, restrictive reproductive rights, and racial and gender hierarchies typical of hegemonic femininity. Notably, Meloni and Le Pen, while being classified as strongwomen, show varying degrees of hostility towards abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, and differing levels of conflation of gender with nativism.
The social organization of care refers to the institutions, norms, and practices that govern the distribution of caring responsibilities and access to caring resources in unequal ways (Glenn 2000; 2012). There is compelling evidence that everywhere women still do the bulk of unpaid care work and that this restricts their opportunities to participate in economic and political life. These inequalities further spill over into the wider economy as many care occupations are poorly paid and predominantly filled by racialized and immigrant women, as well as women from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Feminist scholarship demonstrates that care is not only an issue in its own right. It also lies at the heart of many other political phenomena from the development of welfare states (Ciccia and Sainsbury 2018; Gordon 1991; Koven and Michel 2013), to democratic backsliding and the rise of far-right parties (Briggs 2018; Farris and Rottenberg 2017; Meguid et al. 2025), to the politics of race, immigration, and same-sex families (Ayoub and Stoeckl 2024; Ferree 2021; Hancock 2004). Therefore, the social organization of care is a root cause of gender and intersecting inequalities.
The National Security Council (NSC), established in 1947, advises and assists the President of the United States on matters of national and international security. Members of the NSC include staff seconded from government agencies, like Andrea Freeman (AF) from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Cailin Crockett (CC) from the Department of Defense. During the Joe Biden administration, CC also held a unique position dual-hatted as a Director on the NSC and as a Senior Advisor on the White House Gender Policy Council. This is a slightly edited version of interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 5, 2026, and February 2, 2026.
The Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) advanced democratic development around the globe, with a focus on building strong institutions and protecting citizens' rights. Julie Denham (JD) served as Senior Advisor on Elections and Political Transitions. The gender team at DRG included Caroline Hubbard (CH) as Senior Gender Advisor and Team Lead, Rebecca Gordon (RG) as Senior Gender Specialist, Alessia Stewart (AS) as Gender Advisor, and Meg McClure (MM) as Coordinator of the Network for Gender Inclusive Democracy. In early 2025, the Donald Trump administration officially shut down USAID, including the democracy, human rights, and governance portfolio. This is an edited and compiled version of five interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on December 16, 2025; January 9, 2026; January 15, 2026; January 27, 2026; and January 28, 2026.
