Women in Executive Power

Gretchen Bauer, Manon Tremblay, Gretchen Bauer, Manon Tremblay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136819148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Women in Executive Power studies the participation of women in the political executive around the world—notably in cabinet positions as ministers and sub-ministers and as heads of government and state.

Providing multiple case studies in each chapter, the book provides regional overviews of nine different world regions covering those with the fewest to the most women in executive power. Evaluating the role of socio-cultural, economic and political variables of women's access to cabinet positions and positions of head of state and government, the book shows that women are increasingly moving into positions previously considered 'male'. Tracing the historical trends of women's participation in governments that has markedly increased in the last two decades, the book assesses the factors that have contributed to women's increasing presence in executives and the extent to which women executives, once in office, represent women's interests.

With case studies from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, the Arab world and Oceania, Women in Executive Power will be of interest to scholars of comparative politics, gender and women's studies.

1 Introduction

Gretchen Bauer and Manon Tremblay

In early 2010 just over a dozen women served as heads of state or government around the world – as presidents or prime ministers; additionally, a mere 16.9 percent of cabinet ministers and secretaries across the globe were women.¹ While these numbers are very low, they represent a significant increase over women's presence in executive positions just 50 years ago. Whereas only three women served as heads of state in the 1960s, six in the 1970s and seven in the 1980s, in the 1990s 26 women served as president or prime minister and in the first decade of the 2000s 29 have done so. Women's presence in cabinets worldwide has nearly doubled in the last decade, from just under 9 percent in 1999 to just under 17 percent in 2010. As is more widely known, in the last few decades women have also made great strides in national legislatures with women outnumbering men for the first time ever in a legislative body – in the Chamber of Deputies in Rwanda. Indeed, in mid 2010 more than 26 countries had 30 percent women or more in their single or lower house of parliament, for a worldwide average of 19 percent.

Historically, access to the executive branch – “the highest glass ceiling” – has been considerably more difficult for women than has access to the legislative branch (Reynolds 1999: 572). Watson et al. (2005: 55–6) suggest that executive positions are “the most gendered of all political offices,” with public perceptions of “the maleness of high office” raising concerns about women's ability to make critical decisions particularly in areas of defense, economics, and foreign policy. Indeed, while women's access to both branches has improved markedly in recent years, the pace has been somewhat slower for women entering the executive branch. So, for example, women were reportedly 8.7 percent of cabinet ministers worldwide in 1999 rising to 15.2 percent by 2007 and 16.9 percent in early 2010 (WEDO 2007; IPU 2010d). According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (n.d.), women occupied 13.1 percent of seats in lower or single houses of parliament in 1999, up to 17.5 percent of seats in 2007 and 19 percent in mid 2010.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of women's increasing participation in political executives around the world today. Whereas several recent books examine women's increased legislative representation around the world and in specific regions (Dahlerup 2006a; Bauer and Britton 2006; Tremblay 2008a; Rueschemeyer and Wolchik 2009), few recent books have investigated women's executive representation in the same manner. Those books that have focused on women executives have privileged women presidents and prime ministers and largely ignored women cabinet ministers and secretaries; moreover, they have tended to narrate individual women leaders' stories rather than to analyze more broadly women's participation in political executives (see Genovese 1993; Opfell 1993; Jackson-Laufer 1998; Hoogensen and Solheim 2006; Liswood 2007; Jensen 2008). As such, this book fills a void in the literature on women's participation and representation in political executives.

While we do not argue that the focus on women's recent dramatic increased access to national legislatures is misplaced, we suggest that a failure to recognize the importance of women's increasing access to executives, especially cabinets, is regrettable. Indeed, in most parliamentary systems at least, cabinet ministers play a large role in setting the legislative agenda and they are often the ones to introduce new legislation. Cabinet ministers control substantial portions of the national budget and are responsible for not only initiating but also implementing policy. Cabinet level appointments are key indicators of executive priorities and emphasis, with stronger ministers better able to articulate, defend or promote their policy arenas. Just as importantly, cabinet ministers may engage in “negative agenda control,” that is, in blocking policies that they do not support (Atchison and Down 2009: 6). In terms of the pinnacle of power, it may also be argued that cabinet ministers represent important potential recruits for the position of chief executive. Presidents and prime ministers, meanwhile, set the national policy agenda as well as represent their nations internationally.

Women in Executive Power: A global overview takes a comparative approach to women in political executives – as heads of state and government and in cabinets – with material gathered from nearly every region of the world. Nine regional chapters provide a general overview of women in executives in that region and an in-depth examination of two or three cases in the region. With regional overviews and case studies from across the globe, the book offers the most comprehensive analysis of women in executives around the world to date; drawing together observations from all of the regional chapters, the concluding chapter provides a compelling set of lessons learned.

Overview of the literature

The existing literature on women in executive power has tended to focus on women presidents and prime ministers or women in cabinets but rarely both. In bringing the two elements of the executive together, this book represents an important departure from past volumes. In general, the little work on women executives has privileged those women at the apex of power rather than those women in cabinets – a situation our book seeks to redress. As mentioned above, probably because there have been so few women leaders in the last 50 years, much of the literature on women heads of state and government has provided interviews with and profiles of individual women rather than attempting to aggregate their experiences. At the same time, some of the early studies seem to have provided enduring insights that continue as the state of the art today. So, for example, in the conclusion to his edited book that portrays several women leaders from around the world, Genovese (1993: 211) relates several patterns gleaned from the individual portraits: most women executives (up until the time of writing in the early 1990s) held office in less developed countries and most came to power during times of “social or political distress,” often inheriting their positions in one way or another from male relatives. At the same time, he also notes that most of the women leaders were highly educated and many had prior political experiences. Genovese also suggests that women leaders were more likely to be found in secular political regimes and those with “some form of democracy.” Genovese was unable to evaluate women executives' substantive representation of women.

Published around the same time, Richter's (1991) study of South and Southeast Asian women executives reveals findings that are still widely reported today. Richter homes in on the apparent contradiction between the overall low status of women in much of Asia and a fairly hefty presence of Asian women leaders, beginning with the first woman prime minister in the world in Sri Lanka in 1960. According to Richter, the explanation lies in Asian women leaders' elite status and their familial ties to prominent male politicians who have died, been assassinated or somehow martyred (1991: 528). A similar phenomenon has been asserted for Latin America as well (Jalalzai 2004; Watson et al. 2005). Richter is also unable to evaluate the policy impact of Asian women leaders, but does suggest a role model effect for other women in Asian societies (1991: 539). Unfortunately, she concludes, the exceptional and tragic means by which most Asian women attain executive power suggests that women executives are unlikely to grow in number in the years ahead (1991: 539).

More recently, Watson et al. (2005: 71–3) again seek to extract some commonalities from among women executive leaders based on their respective profiles. Like others, they find that many, though not all, women leaders hail from wealthy, prominent families, indeed, often families with ties to high office. Similarly, they find that several women leaders in the late twentieth century attained executive office during times of “social and political strife” which, in some cases, contributed to shorter terms in office. They also note that “women's leadership is an international phenomenon” with women executives to be found in nearly all world regions.

Jalalzai (2004, 2008) and Jalalzai and Krook (2010) summarize some of the existing literature on women executives and seek to make their own contributions based on their analysis of women leaders since 1960. In her early article, Jalalzai (2004) confirms the observation that Latin American and Asian women leaders have tended to attain power through family ties but notes that this has not been the case in Africa (2004: 103). Jalalzai's survey also reveals that most women leaders have very high levels of political experience and are relatively well educated (2004: 99). In her more recent article, Jalalzai (2008) reiterates earlier findings that women's overall status in a society seems to have little bearing on women's access to executive positions given that more often than not women attain executive office as members of privileged groups. She also notes, as have others, that “political transitions and instability have coincided with women's ascension to executive office all over the world” (2008: 223; see also Hoogensen and Solheim 2006). Finally, she claims that women are more likely to hold executive power when their powers are “relatively few and generally constrained” (2008: 208); thus they are more likely to be prime ministers than presidents and more likely to be presidents in systems in which they share power. More recently, Jalalzai and Krook (2010: 17) conclude that there appear to be important role model effects from women presidents and prime ministers, given that 15 countries have had not just one but two women executives. They further suggest that while some women executives have actively promoted women into cabinet and have advocated women-friendly policies, others quite clearly have not (2010: 17). These questions – concerning the extent to which women heads of state and government substantively represent women and the extent to which they bring more women into cabinets – are addressed in the regional chapters that follow. In addition, the regional chapters address questions of the individual characteristics of women leaders and how they have reached the pinnacle of executive power.

The scant literature on women in cabinets has tended to treat the subject from a regional perspective with the exception of some studies of women in cabinets in the United States in particular (see Carroll 1987; Martin 1989; Borrelli and Martin 1997; Borrelli 2002). Moreover, the bulk of studies concern women in cabinets in the developed rather than developing world. Most of the literature seems to rely upon mid 1990s data, thus missing out on the most recent developments in women's access to executive office. In one of the few global studies, Whitford et al. (2007) seek to uncover differences in women's representation and policymaking authority at the ministerial and sub-ministerial levels. Data from the mid 1990s are drawn from 72 countries. The study finds that women's presence at the ministerial level is positively associated with the proportion of women in the national legislature (assuming a parliamentary system) and the use of an open-list proportional representation electoral system. Women's presence at the sub-ministerial level, by contrast, is influenced by national supply factors such as women's educational attainment and women's economic roles as administrators and managers (2007: 560–1). Further, the study finds that the two levels of representation are conjoined: an increase in women at the ministerial level is associated with an increase in women's presence at the sub-ministerial level – and vice versa (2007: 573). Whitford et al. (2007: 575) suggest that the major significance of their study lies in the conclusion that women's ability to attain ministerial positions is attributable to political forces and initiatives rather than demographic and socioeconomic changes over time. Using data from a similar time period Reynolds (1999: 572) reports similar findings, namely, that the presence of women in cabinets is closely correlated with a government's political orientation and women's presence in the national legislature. He finds that in the mid 1990s women cabinet ministers were still far more likely to be occupying the “softer” socio-cultural portfolios than the four “harder” and more prestigious ministerial positions, namely, defense, finance, home affairs, and foreign affairs (1999: 564).

Mathiason and Dookhony (2006), with more recent data, make the same finding: that women's presence in ministerial positions is most strongly correlated with women's presence in parliament, with the closest correlations with the most recent parliaments. Siaroff (2000) probes Davis’ (1997) work on cabinets in western Europe that identified “generalist” versus “specialist” recruitment norms for cabinet – with the former pulling ministers able to move from portfolio to portfolio from parliament and the latter selecting ministers based on their policy expertise and generally from outside the ranks of parliament. Davis found that women were much less likely to be selected for cabinet in generalist systems – among other reasons, because of the smaller pool of women in parliament, at least in the past. Siaroff's expanded study (in terms of number of countries) of industrial democracies confirmed that specialist recruitment patterns lead to more women in cabinets, as do more egalitarian political cultures and left and centrist governments (2000: 209). (Davis’ other major finding was that women are more likely to be appointed to cabinet after an election than during midterm reshuffles, 1997: 85.)

While these studies have investigated women's descriptive representation in cabinets around the world, Atchison and Down (2009) examine women cabinet ministers' substantive representation in 18 advanced industrial democracies between 1980 and 2003. Noting that women's greater presence in national legislatures has had a beneficial impact on the adoption of social policy favorable to women, they seek to determine if a similar relationship exists between women in cabinets and female-friendly social policy (2009: 1). Investigating family leave policy in 18 parliamentary democracies, they find that the proportion of women in cabinet is positively associated with total weeks of maternity and parental leave guaranteed by the state. Moreover, given the role of executives in proposing and passing legislation, the authors assert that having women in cabinet is of even greater importance than having women in parliament (2009: 17). On a related note, in their study of the recent rapid proliferation of state bureaucracies for gender mainstreaming across the world, True and Mintrom (2001: 49) find that the proportion of women cabinet members has a statistically significant impact on the adoption of those bureaucracies whereas the proportion of women members of parliament does not.

Considerably less optimistic about the potential impact of women heads of government or cabinet ministers, Sykes (2009) argues that in the Anglo-American nations (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) several factors converge to thwart women executives' substantive representation of women. Sykes (2009: 37–8) suggests that Anglo-American institutions, ideology, and political development are highly masculinist, privileging traditional masculine traits in leaders and placing “women executives at a distinct disadvantage.” Anglo-American political systems, Sykes continues (2009: 38–9), are adversarial systems with power heavily concentrated in the executive; indeed, only three women have ever been elected head of state in one of these countries. Worse yet, Sykes asserts (2009: 39), because of the “presidentialization” of the executive, “just as women reached cabinet level in greater numbers, the leadership opportunities associated with that office were eroding.” Anglo-American women cabinet ministers, meanwhile (some notable exceptions aside), have largely held portfolios dealing with domestic policies and programs, such as education, health, and welfare – with the worry being that these positions “threaten to become regendered as ‘women's posts’” (2009: 40).

Russell and DeLancey (2002), again relying upon data up to 1996, investigate women's presence in ministerial and sub-ministerial positions in Africa. In 1996, 26 African countries were below the world average percentage of women in ministerial positions (6.8 percent), while 25 were above. They seek to identify the determinants of women's representation in cabinets. In testing the relationship between gross national product per capita, literacy, life expectancy, and women's presence in cabinets, only higher life expectancy was found to be positively associated with more women in cabinet (2002: 160), thus confirming the findings of other studies that women's overall socioeconomic status in a polity may have no direct bearing on women's access to executive offices. In general, they conclude that during the period under study, 1970 to 1996, women were under-represented in cabinets in Africa, though there were signs of improvement, and that women were generally to be found in the less significant and less powerful ministries, a finding that had not changed during the period under study. Russell and DeLancey do not consider the education or health portfolios to be among the more important ministerial posts, despite their vital roles in African societies.

In two articles, Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson (2005, 2009) investigate women in cabinets in 18 Latin American democracies from 1980 to 2003. In the first article (2005), they investigate some of the same issues treated in studies above – what factors seem to affect women's access to executive posts, the frequency with which women are appointed, and to which portfolios they are most likely to be assigned. They note that by the early 2000s women were represented in significant proportions in an increasing number of Latin American countries; indeed, they were 50 and 29 percent of ministers in Colombia and Honduras in 2003 and 2002, respectively. They conclude that by the mid 2000s it was unusual to find a Latin American cabinet without at least one woman minister. Further, in these 18 Latin American countries having more women in the national legislature was associated with more women in cabinet. In addition, Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson found that presidents from leftist parties and presidents who found themselves in more partisan political environments were likely to appoint more women to their cabinets. Finally, they cite international pressure, in other words, a diffusion effect, as having a powerful impact on women's presence in Latin American executives as well. In their subsequent study, Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson (2009) seek to determine whether Latin American cabinets are “gendered institutions,” meaning, among other things, that “they may operate in a way that systematically denies women an equal opportunity to participate” – and that with a few exceptions women in cabinets will largely be tokens (2009: 685). They conclude that, overall, there are gendered patterns to cabinet appointments in the 18 Latin American democracies, but (and in contrast to the Anglo-American countries) that as the number of women in cabinets increases it is likely that women will also increasingly be appointed to the more prestigious ministries to which they are not typically appointed (2009: 696–7). All of the regional chapters in this volume address the issue of the portfolios to which women cabinet members tend to be assigned, in many cases questioning the accuracy of a hierarchical dichotomy of “hard” and “soft” portfolios.

Overview of the book

These findings and remaining questions from the literature on women executives to date form the backdrop for the rest of our book. Our cursory review of the literature reveals that there appear to be geographic patterns in women's participation and representation in executives and so we have organized the book into regional chapters, albeit with each regional chapter also providing an in-depth analysis of two or three cases wit...