First, I want to thank Liesl Haas for her thoughtful and generous review of The Women's Movement Inside and Outside the State. She raises two set of questions which I would like to address here. First, she asks whether a better sample of insider activists would have been found by choosing key pieces of policy and identifying the major players as she does in her own book. While every sampling strategy represents a trade-off when no clear sampling frame exists, such a method seems to me fraught with a number of dangers, including a selection bias towards visible and successful cases (which might lead us to examine only insider feminist successes and exclude those who were influential but less visible) and predefinition by the investigator of what constitutes a feminist policy. I believe one of the strengths of my study was the finding that insider feminists influenced policies ordinarily not identified as feminist—such as foreign aid legislation or scientific research in the NIH. Haas argues a change in sampling method might have increased the number of younger feminists (who were underrepresented in the sample) but their underrepresentation results largely from a focus on activists in higher positions in the bureaucracy, the tendency of fewer feminists to enter the bureaucracy under post-Reagan republican administrations, and my conscious decision to focus on the period before 2001 when interviewing so that I did not ask questions about the current administration.

Haas also suggests that such a sampling strategy would have helped to identify supporters of these policy reforms beyond self-identified feminists. She notes her own work finds male representatives from the Left were important for feminist policies in Chile. However, extensive previous work on women's policy agencies already examines such supporters, but misclassifies feminist activists as allies, since it does not distinguish between the movement and its allies. A major argument of my book is that movement activists inside the state are fundamentally different from supporters. Such allies have different interests leading them to provide limited or partial support feminist policy (pp. 6–7). This distinction is, I believe, important for understanding both social movements and policy making.

Finally Haas asks about the likely implications of insider feminists on the representation of feminist interests in the state, and on wider theories of representation. Some issues of descriptive and substantive representation, while not explicitly discussed as such, are central to the book's conclusions. I argue that feminist insiders do not look like feminist outside activists because high level positions in the bureaucracy limits access to those with high education and specific occupations, while maintaining these activists in higher socio-economic categories. As the book notes, representation theory also argues that government bureaucracy should respond to the presidential administration, but within that constraint insider activists engaged in substantive representation of the women's movement in a wide array of issues, sometimes in very innovative ways. However, Haas' questions will be helpful to me as I continue my research on feminist activists inside the state.