Women remain underrepresented in leadership positions. Yet, we know little about how women use the limited opportunities they have once they are in positions of power. To continue closing this gap, this study examines how gender and situational context affect speaking time at government press conferences. We argue that women, particularly women politicians, speak longer to compensate for their limited positional power, reinforcing their perceived competence. Our findings based on data from 1,002 press conferences across 15 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic confirm this hypothesis, showing that women leaders speak longer, but their speech length decreases as more women participate. However, broader gender equality levels do not influence this pattern. These results contribute to research on politics and gender, highlighting how women strategically use speech to assert influence in men-dominated spaces.
This article analyzes the politics surrounding the adoption of a national legislative gender quota in Kyrgyzstan, one of the five post-Soviet Central Asian states. Though women comprise half of Kyrgyzstan's population, at one point there were no women in the Kyrgyz parliament. I argue that the emergence of a one-gender parliament catalyzed a robust civil society lobbying campaign for a gender quota that was a necessary but insufficient cause of policy change, as it owed its success to sympathetic domestic politics and support from the international community. The article, which is based on 38 semi-structured interviews I conducted in Bishkek with people who convinced the authorities and population of the need for a national gender quota, concludes with a summary of gender quota adoption in Poland that contextualizes theoretical implications of the Kyrgyz case.
This paper evaluates whether the men and women who hold the position of state party chair have different previous experiences and explores which factors correlate with state parties electing women chairs. Given the gender gap in political ambition, I predict women state party chairs will more commonly have previous experience in their political party organization, such as serving as county chair or vice chair, than to have previously held elected office. In comparison, I predict men are more likely to have previously held elected office. Considering the career paths of state Democratic and Republican party chairs from 2015 to 2024, I find support for these expectations. State party chairs who previously served as vice chair of their state party are more likely to be women, while state party chairs who have previous experience in public, nonparty office are more likely to be men.
Participation by Asian American women and Latinas as campaign contributors is usually lower than other groups, including Asian American men, Latino men, and white women - an inequality in political voice that may disproportionately affect the financial success of Asian American women and Latina candidates. I argue that financial resources - the prime suspect in most campaign contribution analyses - are limited in explaining which Asian American women and Latinas give to politics. These results pose a challenge to resource-based theories and their applicability to women from diverse and disproportionately immigrant populations. The results also suggest that factors such as party politics and citizenship should play a larger role in campaign finance studies of diverse Americans.
