Women have made spectacular gains in reaching executive office over the past decade, serving as elected presidents and prime ministers in countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. But women’s gains are not limited to the chief executive office. Another emerging global trend is for newly elected leaders to appoint an equal number of male and female ministers. Parity cabinets have appeared in countries as diverse as Nicaragua, Canada, Italy, and Sweden. Yet despite these gains, the executive branch remains a highly masculinized political arena. Most countries have never been led by a woman, and men are the majority of cabinet ministers around the world. Janet M. Martin and MaryAnne Borrelli’s excellent volume tackles some of the most interesting and vexing questions about the gendered nature of executive office. Importantly, the editors bring a comparative focus to the American presidency, including chapters on the U.S. executive but also chapters that deal with other single cases, like India and Chile. Other chapters engage in cross-national comparisons. The book’s comparative focus means that readers gain insight into global developments that often appear contradictory, with progress in some areas but not others.
Taken together, the chapters in the volume constitute an important contribution to knowledge about gender and executives. Specifically, three virtues are worth mentioning. First, the volume underscores a point often made by scholars of politics and gender, namely, that gender is not synonymous with women. As the editors note in their introduction, “men are also gendered, and the study of masculinity reveals a great deal about the U.S. presidency” (p. 6). Second, the volume covers a diverse range of themes and questions related to gender. Some chapters look at individual officeholders and how gender shapes their performance, while other chapters explore the broader consequences of women’s presence in the executive branch. Finally, the authors critically examine a range of institutions within the executive branch, not just the presidency or prime ministership.
This volume is not about “women” in executive office but, rather, as the title indicates, explores the “gendered executive.” While many chapters examine the behavior and impact of female executives, several chapters address the gendered construction and behavior of male executives. A chapter by Cory Charles Gooding addresses President Barack Obama’s gender and race performance, revealing how the former president strategically countered gender and race expectations by embodying not only the “masculine toughness” expected of U.S. presidents but also feminine qualities like collaboration and inclusiveness (p. 47). Another chapter by Sheetal Chhabria examines the gender performance of India’s male prime minister, Narendra Modi, demonstrating how he blurred the gender binary as a strategy for bringing together the Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata party with a more market-oriented economic order, combining a (feminized) cultural identity with a (masculinized) developmental agenda. Finally, a chapter by Ariella R. Rotramel examines how American presidents have represented the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered movement, concluding that neither Republican nor Democratic presidents have effectively represented the movement’s interests.
Edited volumes on politics and gender are particularly valuable when contributors employ a range of approaches and methods, effectively revealing how gender operates at the individual and societal level. In addition to the chapters on Obama and Modi, one by Catherine Reyes-Housholder shows how gender shaped the policy priorities of Chile’s first female president, Michelle Bachelet. Reyes-Housholder finds that compared to her predecessor, Ricardo Lagos, Bachelet was more likely to use executive prerogatives to fast-track gender policies, resulting in greater success for pro-women policy change in her administration. A chapter by Borrelli and Lilly Goren likewise directly compares men and women, in this case, Republican vice-presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan. The authors show that both candidates offered gendered narratives that either challenged (in Palin’s case) or reinforced (in Ryan’s case) existing ideas about the role of vice presidents in the American executive.
Other chapters move beyond gender at the individual behavior level to explore the broader consequences of women’s presence in the executive branch. A chapter by Amy Alexander and Farida Jalalzai draws on public opinion data from 56 countries to show that having a female leader matters: Women’s level of political interest increases when their country is led by a woman, while both men and women “are more likely to support women leaders and vote” (p. 33) in women-led countries. A chapter by Reyes-Housholder and Leslie Schwindt-Bayer also looks at the broader consequences of female leaders, this time on women’s political activity. Again, the findings confirm that women’s presence in executive office matters. In Latin America, where women have been elected president eight times since 1999, the authors find that having a female president affects male and female citizens differently. Women’s political activity increases, but men’s does not. Together, these chapters offer much-needed empirical support for the idea that women’s presence in leadership positions changes how people think about the office itself, namely, the gendered characteristics that leaders should possess, but also how citizens think and act themselves.
Finally, the volume is valuable in exploring how gender operates in a range of executive institutions, not just the chief executive office. In their chapter, Maria Escobar-Lemmon and Michelle Taylor-Robinson examine the gendered dimensions of cabinet, asking whether “first women” (that is, the first woman to hold a particular portfolio in a country) differ from the men who typically hold the post. Notably, they find that “first women appear to conform to the male norm for credentials in their post” (p. 253). The finding confirms patterns in other studies that women in politics, particularly at the highest echelons of power, tend to be fairly similar in terms of background characteristics to their male colleagues, raising questions about whether women bring different perspectives to their political roles. A chapter by Georgia Duerst-Lahti examines Hillary Clinton’s impact as secretary of state, finding that having a woman committed to feminist goals in the executive branch can have far-reaching consequences, not just domestically but internationally as well. Karen M. Hult addresses an underexplored theme, namely, how the representation of women’s interests might be advanced within the White House. Hult finds that some White House entities, such as the Council on Women and Girls, have excelled at outreach and communication, but have not really provided opportunities for stakeholders to influence public policy.
In sum, The Gendered Executive considerably expands our knowledge about the myriad ways that gender operates in the executive branch, creating opportunities and obstacles for differently situated men and women who seek to occupy executive office and succeed in doing so. The only minor weakness of the volume is that the editors did not provide readers with a concluding chapter that synthesizes the various findings and themes in the individual chapters. It would have been enormously helpful to conclude by pulling out similarities and differences across executives in different countries and perhaps indicating how the volume’s findings could be used to inform future research on gender in the executive branch.
