Gendered inequalities in campaign finance are generally considered an important impediment to the equal representation of women in parliament. A multivariate analysis of 11,897 Flemish candidates in the Belgian elections from 1999 to 2019 provides strong new evidence of the gender gap in campaign spending, showing that women candidates are significantly outspent by men. But this gender gap is only present after the introduction of strict quota and is limited to non-incumbents. It takes 16 years and five elections after the introduction of strict quotas before this gender gap narrows. In terms of the funding of their campaigns, women draw significantly less money from their personal wealth and receive less money from their parties when strict quotas are in place.

The 2024 presidential election was historic in many ways, but one trend did not buck the norm: the gender gap. Indeed, despite Kamala Harris becoming the first Black and South Asian woman to win a majority party’s nomination, the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, and clear attempts by the Harris campaign to win over white Republican women voters, “gender differences in vote choice in the 2024 elections were remarkably similar to recent presidential elections” (CAWP 2024). This essay highlights the long-term ideological and demographic shifts among party constituencies that can help to explain why Republican women cast their vote for Donald Trump, even in a uniquely gendered political landscape.

In the 20 years since the founding of Politics & Gender, gender and politics scholarship has coalesced into a distinct body of research and community of scholarship (Sawer 2025; Tripp 2025). The research published in this journal and others cuts across the traditional political science subfields, methodological approaches, and regional boundaries. While engaging with different topics and parts of the larger discipline, gender and politics research distinguishes itself through its turning around a shared understanding that gender plays a critical explanatory role in our political worlds – whether that be in the gendered ways that politics is enacted or the gendered consequences of political actions. There is a shared language of scholarship amongst researchers.

Do party elites strategically nominate (non)veiled women? While research exists on Muslim-minority countries, little is known about the dynamics of such strategies in Muslim-majority contexts, where the interplay of Islam, secularism, gender, and veiling is complex. To address this gap, I examine electoral competition in Turkey, investigating whether parties strategically nominate (non)veiled women for mayoral seats in opposing party strongholds to capitalize on the political symbols associated with women’s identities — a strategy I term “symbolic leverage.” Using an original dataset, elite interviews, and electoral discourse analysis, I find that parties leverage the symbolic value of veiled and nonveiled women candidates to appeal to rival party voters. Moreover, interviews with Islamist party elites show that nominating nonveiled women serves multiple objectives for them: signaling tolerance for secular lifestyles, assuaging concerns about Islamization, attracting swing voters, and projecting a democratic image. These findings illuminate how parties utilize women’s inclusion in polarized contexts.

The 2018 election cycle was referred to as a “Rainbow Wave” because of the record number of LGBTQ+ candidates seeking and winning elective office. The backlash toward the LGBTQ+ community during the first Trump administration, at the local and national level, invigorated queer candidates to run for office. Then, in 2020 and 2022, news headlines again called the election cycles a “Rainbow Wave” (Debussy 2020; Lavietes 2022). According to the Victory Institute, the 2024 election marked a 1.1% increase in LGBTQ+ candidates compared to 2020, however, it was also a 4.8% decrease compared to candidates in 2022. Further, among LGBTQ+ candidates, the share of lesbian candidates dropped nearly 10 percentage points, from 26.7% of all LGBTQ+ candidates in 2020 to only 16.1% in 2024. At the same time, the group of LGBTQ+ candidates in 2024 were the most racially diverse in history, with 37.6% being people of color and just over 15% not identifying as cisgender (LGBTQ+ Victory Fund 2024).

The adoption of a feminist foreign policy (FFP) by Mexico took Mexican feminist civil society by surprise. In September 2019, without prior consultations or dialogues with local feminist civil society, the Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary announced its FFP during the 74th session of the UN General Assembly. While the UN New York City headquarters roared with applause in response to the Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary’s claim that the “Mexican government is feminist,” many feminists in Mexico interpreted the statement as an effort to pinkwash the government’s poor track record on gender equality within its borders. Moreover, Mexico’s FFP was charged with racial and colonial undertones since its inception, colloquially known as the “first FFP from the Global South” (Thompson 2020; Thompson, Ahmed, and Khokhar 2021).

As this article is being finalized, US President Donald J. Trump has taken numerous executive actions to challenge gender identity; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs; and the rights of marginalized populations broadly. These xenophobic, anti-gender political agendas are gaining momentum worldwide (Ayoub and Stoeckle 2024). My hope is that these brief words inspire future politics and gender scholars to apply their research skills to challenge these heteropatriarchal policies that so often reinforce sexism, racism, and homophobia in the name of nationalism. When the Politics & Gender journal began in 2005, the justification question underlying much of its existence was “Does gender matter?” In 2025, if one is to measure the importance of gender by the amount of resistance to gender inclusive policies and feminist advances, one could easily argue that not only does gender matter-but it matters even more.

At the 2024 US Democratic Convention, Kamala Harris presented her approach to the military in her speech accepting her historic nomination as the party’s candidate for the US presidency. In this essay, I reflect on the question: what would it mean if a woman of color led the American empire? I argue that scholars of gender, politics, and representation must turn their attention toward evaluating not just how gender conditions how politicians legislate, run their campaigns, or face barriers to winning office — but whether and to what extent politicians of any gender use their identities to combat the material suffering wrought by American imperialism. I echo calls for greater attention to power structures in the study of gender and representation (Brown et al. 2024) and argue that we must decenter “imperial feminism” and recenter tenets from Black and Third World feminism (Amos and Parmar 1984; Johnson-Odim 1991; Taylor 2017). To this end, I theorize a new type of representative that bridges these concerns: identity representatives.

Over the past 20–30 years, women’s parties have consistently formed across Europe, aiming to improve women’s substantive representation by politicizing gender issues. Despite their potential impact on the policy agenda, empirical knowledge of the full range and scope of issues these parties mobilize is limited. This paper presents a novel mixed-method text analysis of the issue concerns in an original dataset of European women’s parties’ manifestos spanning a 30-year period. I find that parties across contexts share concerns in social justice and social policy. However, two subtypes of women’s party can be differentiated based on issue focus and framing. Essentialist women’s parties predominantly represent women’s material interests, whereas feminist parties additionally tackle structural gender inequality issues, including gender-based violence and human security. These findings provide a foundation for incorporating women’s parties into growing research on party competition over gender issues.

For nearly a decade, the concept of feminist foreign policy1 (FFP) has garnered global attention, with numerous countries adopting or expressing the intent to adopt such policies. However, the roles of Africans within these discourses, as both target and agents of FFP, has been uncertain. The particular attention paid by FFP to the Global South makes the exclusion of African knowledges especially jarring.

Over the past quarter-century, the literature on gender, peace, and security has evolved into a substantial interdisciplinary field. In this line of work, researchers have investigated the interplay between state security and women’s security, or how gender equality at the state level affects the occurrence of international and intranational conflict. The conclusion is that more gender-equal countries are less prone to engage in warfare, pointing toward a link between women’s security and national security. Various indicators have been used to capture gender equality in this literature, such as the representation of women in parliamentary roles, the proportion of women participating in the labor force, and school enrollment among girls relative to boys.

Scholar-activism, which we define as scholarship that seeks to contribute knowledge to activism is often underappreciated. From a methodological perspective, the positionality of scholar-activists is too often misunderstood. Yet scholar-activism is a relatively common approach to generating new knowledge about hard-to-access, repressive contexts while also assisting political movements and their strategies. Feminist-informed scholarship necessitates scholar-activism because it is driven by an emancipatory purpose that demands critical reflexivity about the power of epistemology, boundaries, relationships, and the researcher’s situatedness (Ackerly and True 2020, 22). We argue that a deeper understanding of scholar-activism and lived experiences is vital for furthering knowledge and impact in the politics and gender field.

As more governments commit to feminist foreign policies (FFPs), this commitment trickles down to a central foreign policy area: peacebuilding. As a field, peacebuilding has historically been dominated by western states and western-dominated institutions performing interventions along the hegemonic liberal peacebuilding paradigm (Lederach 1997; Mac Ginty 2008). This has, in turn, provoked significant feminist criticisms and interventions (Duncanson 2016; Hewitt and True 2021; McLeod 2018). When Germany, the largest peacebuilding funder globally (Rotmann, Li, and Stoffel 2021; UN Peacebuilding 2024), announced their FFP in 2023, this development opened up the prospect for substantial feminist change, but also raised questions about what such change might look like in practice.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many Latin American countries transitioned from dictatorships to democracies, paving the way for the structural redesign of their foreign policies. In response to sustained feminist mobilization in civil society, by the 2000s several of these countries had established gender divisions in their Ministries of Foreign Affairs. These divisions prioritized the incorporation of gender equality norms in their national and international legal obligations and established protocols to implement gender equality measures. As part of this process, there was also a push for increased participation of women in the foreign policy arena, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Uruguay (Fuentes-Julio et al. 2022).

What does it mean to be a brave woman? In 2020, we saw Belarusian women take to the streets dressed in white to oppose the violent dictatorship that had been in power for twenty-six years. In 2021, our television screens showed the Fall of Kabul, and the takeover by Taliban fighters, who overnight began to reverse decades of women’s empowerment. In response, and despite the risks, women demonstrators took to the streets in Kabul to demand their rights to work, education, and political participation. And in late 2022, we saw Iranian women fight for freedom, cutting their hair and burning their headscarves as they called for women’s rights in the context of brutal repression. These are but a handful of the myriad examples of women transgressing what is societally expected of them. They go out into the streets, they post on social media, they protest governments and make demands for change. Around the world, we see women being brave. They do so at great personal risk, and often when the potential benefits of being brave are infinitesimally small.

Gender-based violence (GBV) has become a prominent theme in feminist struggles across Africa (Medie 2019). A burgeoning literature has recently emerged as a result of debates about GBV in a variety of African settings, resulting in a multifaceted picture of the causes and consequences of GBV in the continent (Aroussi 2017; Ayiera 2010; Bennett 2010; Oku 2021). As laudable as this body of research is, certain lacunae are easily noticeable in respect to studying GBV in Portuguese-speaking countries, especially in smaller states such as Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. With a few exceptions (Henriques et al. 2015; Moura et al. 2009; Mourão 2009; Silva 2021, 2022), these countries are often neglected in feminist research in Africa, especially in English-speaking circles. There is even less attention paid to the particular political settings of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau and how they affect feminist agendas around GBV.

Scholars of gender have long realized that questions regarding gender, women, and politics require a multi-method, nuanced approach. When a plurality of white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, social scientists increasingly began to recognize the urgency of undertaking new approaches to understanding gender, race, and voting behavior in the United States.1 Since then, researchers have helped us understand why so many white women support right-wing candidates and policies that aim to suppress their autonomy, offering explanations such as the influence of belief in traditional gender roles (Christley 2022), “possessive investments in white heteropatriarchy” (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor 2017, 354), and “gendered nationalism” in American politics (Deckman and Cassese 2021, 278). In more recent years — as election results and polling suggest growing numbers of men of color have shifted rightward — there has been increased interest in employing an intersectional approach to analyze the gulf between men and women of color.

Three days before the Irish general election in November 2024, Ireland lost one of its foremost and trailblazing women of the 20th century: Gemma Hussey. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hussey served as a Senator, Teachta Dála (TD, a member of Dáil Éireann, the lower house of parliament in Ireland), and Cabinet Minister, and before and after her time in Irish politics, she remained a steadfast campaigner for progressive women’s rights, oftentimes in the face of staunch opposition from the Catholic Church, party colleagues, and the public. She was also a strong advocate of measures to support, facilitate, and promote women in politics.

The United Nations Security Council’s passage of Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) in October 2000 marked a groundbreaking moment in time for women, policymakers, peacebuilders, and feminists across the globe. With this resolution, states tasked with maintaining international security signaled their agreement that the involvement of women in political leadership, politics, and peacebuilding was crucial for the maintenance of international peace and stability. They urged the incorporation of women’s perspectives into all policies and post-conflict frameworks. UNSCR 1325 has served as the centerpiece of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda for more than two decades, and scholars and policymakers have been both critical and supportive of this key document. As UNSCR 1325 reaches its 25th anniversary in October 2025, I asked leading scholars in the field to reflect on the current state of UNSCR 1325 — in particular, where it has brought us and where they expect it is or should be going.