The topic of gender blindness is increasingly gaining the attention of researchers. Even in fields that do not commonly engage with gender, gender blindness has been recognized as a factor that has potential to limit the validity of research findings. This article explores the prevalence and implications of gender blindness in quantitative research for political science outcomes. We first reanalyze three articles recently published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) to illustrate the impact of gender blindness on quantitative research. Next, we classify all articles with quantitative methodology published in the AJPS in 2018 and 2019 by the degree of gender blindness in the research design. Our findings demonstrate how gender blindness impacts outcomes and estimate its prevalence in political science. They show that accounting for gender yields more accurate results and facilitates a better understanding of political behavior and phenomena.

This article examines women’s perceptions of and experiences with institutional norms in political science departments and their institutions. Conceptually, it builds on feminist institutionalism. Specifically, it examines the broad institutional norms, formal and informal, that define political science departments within their larger institutions, as well as potential avenues for change. I argue that a “critical mass” of women in academic departments and the presence of “critical actors” in departmental and university leadership positions sympathetic to the cause and powerful enough to implement change can bring about institutional reforms. To that end, I conducted a survey among 1,273 female PhD students and faculty members in political science departments across the United States. The survey questions revolve around women’s perceptions of institutional gender norms, the way they are judged by them, their ability to have professional success under them, and their (or others’) ability to change them. After discussing the survey results within the context of feminist institutional theory, I offer some conclusions about the positions of women in political science departments in the United States, the implications of this for the profession at-large, and some thoughts on avenues for future research on the issue.

Although mayors can have important impacts on citizens’ daily lives, local politics remains understudied, especially compared with national and regional politics. This study focuses on Canadian mayors’ digital political gender performance—or self-presentation—on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and the context in which this gendered performance arises. Overall, results confirm that mayors’ gendered performances are on a continuum rather than binary. Results from a visual content analysis of nine Canadian mayors’ social media accounts show that, broadly speaking, women mayors gravitate toward congruent, mixed gendered performances and avoidance strategies, whereas men mayors also display mixed performance of their gender, while more freely exploring congruent and incongruent approaches to gendered stereotypes. Additionally, semistructured interviews with these mayors show that women mayors still work under added constraints because of their gender, which translates into comments on their appearance, attitude, and lifestyle choices; increased aggression and lack of respect; and a generally greater mental load.

Very little in my adult life has made me feel my feminism so strongly as the 2016 defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton. And by “defeat,” I mean her utter evisceration by the press, many Bernie Sanders supporters, the Donald Trump campaign, and a shocking number of regular Americans. The disgusting patriarchal bacchanalia that occurred during the campaign has nearly been matched by the attacks on Clinton that have continued since the election. She has been criticized even for writing a memoir of the election, What Happened, a book that has been variously called too long to read (Frank 2017) and an exercise in shifting responsibility (Zurcher 2017).

The aim of the article is to develop our understanding of the role bodies play in processes of institutional change. It does so through developing an approach to the politics of institutional newness that highlights the way in which raced and gendered bodies can become entangled with claims to, or judgements of, “being new.” These questions are explored through South Africa's Constitutional Court, newly established as part of South Africa's transition to democracy in the 1990s and at the center of the broader claims being made about the creation of a new democratic, nonracial, and non-sexist South Africa. Focusing on judicial appointments to the Constitutional Court since 1994, the article draws attention to the ways in which historically excluded bodies, women and black men, have been included into this new space within the judiciary. It is argued that exploring the ways in which institutions lay claim to “being new” through the bodies of historically excluded groups is important for our understanding of the dynamics of institutional change being constituted.

Women are disproportionately underrepresented in political science, but even more so in the field of international relations and especially at its highest ranks. Moreover, women tend to research different topics than men and teach in markedly different ways from their male counterparts. These are the findings of the 2006 Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) Survey carried out by Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney. Their article details the results of their survey and offers some explanations for these differences. Four leading scholars of international relations—Mary Ann Tétreault, Brooke Ackerly, Jacqui True, and Laura Sjoberg react to these findings and offer diverse perspectives in analyzing the implications of the TRIP survey findings for women scholars and for the broader field of international relations.

In the field of political science, scholars can contribute to the growing literature on gender and politics in multiple ways. While research articles remain important for scholars to communicate their research, they are not the only way. Scholars might consider other means to contribute to the scholarship, such as through research notes, book reviews, and review essays (a particular type of literature review). Specific to Politics & Gender, Critical Perspectives and Notes from the Field are two more avenues for scholars to engage in the gender and politics scholarly conversation. Each of these publication types provides a way for scholars to participate in the conversation about current political phenomena, research innovations, or topics of concern in the field. In what follows, I distinguish between the type of publishing opportunities available in the field of political science and the options specific to Politics & Gender. I also discuss what scholars should think about when considering the type of publication they want to submit.

To advocate for restrictive immigration policies, conservative U.S. politicians have advanced a narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against White women. This framing of immigrant threat builds on a long history of similar anti-Black discourse and activates racialized ideas about protecting femininity. I demonstrate how the identities of purported victims of immigrant crime connect attitudes about immigration with benevolent sexism—a superficially positive, protective attitude toward particular types of women. An original survey experiment shows that benevolent sexism is activated when victims of immigrant crime are White women. Using nationally representative survey data, I show that the benevolent face of sexism has a notable impact on the immigration attitudes of White Americans, particularly when it comes to the protectionist policy of policing of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Do female legislators have different policy preferences than male legislators? Despite a large body of literature from liberal democracies and recent studies of electoral authoritarian regimes, this topic has received little attention in the context of single-party regimes. Based on quasi-experimental methods and regression models, we analyze original data from 38,383 proposals introduced during China’s 12th National People’s Congress and test the effect of gender on policies concerning conventionally selected feminine issues and “political stance,” issues that are unique to single-party regimes. The analysis confirms the effect of gender on policy preference across several feminine issues. However, the effect of gender is null on issues concerning political stance. Our findings suggest that while single-party regimes allow gender differences to emerge among legislators on issues that are not politically important, they tend to discourage such differences on politically prominent issues. This study advances the literature on both gender politics and authoritarian politics.

The “social eligibility pool” stands as one of the most common, and most powerful, explanations for women's underrepresentation in elective office. By this view, women are underrepresented in elite politics because sex discrimination and socialization have produced a gender imbalance in the occupations that typically precede a political career (Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994). The scarcity of women in law and business has implications for politics: “The absence of women from these stepping-stones to political office does explain a good portion of women's under-representation in public office. A decrease in this under-representation helps explain gains in women holding office” (1994, 179).

It is important to take the time and look both backward and forward at the women's movement: how it has influenced the past and how it is likely to be important in the future. But why do we ask this question in the first place?

As Women and Politics Research enters its third decade as an organized Section of the American Political Science Association, we begin the third volume of Politics & Gender, the official journal of the Section. Our goal as editors, and the mission of Politics & Gender, has been “to publish the very best work on women and politics, and on gender and politics” (I.1: 2). Across the three volumes of our editorship, we are proud to have established a journal that political scientists worldwide recognize as the standard for politics and gender scholarship. From empirical analyses of women's political representation to feminist theorizing to feminist textual analyses of U.S. security rhetoric and health-care reform, Politics & Gender has sought to publish high-quality work that ranges across methodologies, topics, subfields, and disciplines.

The social and economic forces that shape attitudes toward the welfare state are of central concern to social scientists. Scholarship in this area has paid limited attention to how working part-time, the employment status of nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce, affects redistribution preferences. In this article, we theoretically develop and empirically test an argument about the ways that part-time work, and its relationship to gender, shape redistribution preferences. We articulate two gender-differentiated pathways—one material and one about threats to social status—through which part-time work and gender may jointly shape individuals’ preferences for redistribution. We test our argument using cross-sectional and panel data from the General Social Survey in the United States. We find that the positive relationship between part-time employment, compared to full-time employment, and redistribution preferences is stronger for men than for women. Indeed, we do not detect a relationship between part-time work and redistribution preferences among women. Our results provide support for a gendered relationship between part-time employment and redistribution preferences and demonstrate that both material and status-based mechanisms shape this association.

In this brief contribution, we highlight some of the ways Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference has served as both a touchstone and a challenge to feminist political theorists struggling to deal with the complexities of “equality” and community. We look briefly at three seemingly different cases, showing how Young's critique of impartiality in this book helps to illuminate what is wrong with the recent Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. It also helps us clarify our thinking about how to remedy unequal access to reproductive technologies and shows how the recognition of group difference is an important counterweight to a false universality.

Building on Mark Granovetter's concept of weak ties, we argue that diverse social networks can enhance the propensity of women to vote for a party of the Left. Using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study, we test two hypotheses: First, the wider the range of women known, the more likely women are to vote for the Left, and second, the wider the range of higher-status women known, the more likely married women are to vote for the Left. We argue that socially communicated cues may be particularly consequential for women because they tend to know less about the parties and their platforms than men do. Accordingly, casual acquaintances can be an important source of new information for women. Women with more diverse ties to other women, we argue, are more likely to encounter women who are voting for the party of the Left and to recognize their shared interest in voting similarly. Our second hypothesis builds on Susan Carroll's argument that women require sufficient autonomy to express their gender-related interests in their choice of party. We argue that married women's political autonomy can be enhanced if their social networks include a range of women who do enjoy such autonomy. Ties with higher-status women can be a source of psychological resources that facilitate voting for a party of the Left. We find support for both of these hypotheses.