What Does the Rising Tide of Women in Executive Office Mean?

Abstract

Americans came the closest they ever had to nominating a female presidential candidate in 2008, yet the possibility of a woman president in the end remained elusive. However, in recent years a number of other countries have seen women claim the presidency for the first time: in Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, Finland, India, and Liberia. Women have also become chancellor in Germany and prime minister in countries like Moldova, Ukraine, and Mozambique. Since 2000, 27 female leaders have assumed national office as president or prime minister. It has always been difficult to generalize about women heads of state and government because there have been so few of them, but the recent rise in women executives has opened up new possibilities for comparative scholarship (see the longitudinal study by Farida Jalalzai, “Women Rule: Shattering the Executive Glass Ceiling,” in the June 2008 issue of Politics & Gender). Much of the existing literature on the subject has looked, for example, at attitudes toward women in executive position and at the media's focus on women executives' personal characteristics, their emotional state, clothing, domestic abilities, and the way they negotiate their family relations.