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The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in women's presence in local politics. According to the newly published United Nations (UN) Women in Local Government data set, women constitute 36% of local deliberative bodies worldwide compared to merely 25% in national parliaments.1 Much of this increase is the result of gender quotas: the Gender Quotas Database (International IDEA 2022) shows that as of 2021, 75 countries had some form of gender quota on the local level, 24 of which were authoritarian regimes. Yet, extant work on gender politics in authoritarian regimes tends to focus on the national level, given the highly centralized decision-making processes in such contexts. We contend that the study of women's engagement and representation in local politics can help scholars better understand not only gender and politics, but also authoritarian politics more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although authoritarian regimes often repress the rights of women, many autocrats have committed to international treaties protecting women's human rights. Scholars have typically overlooked this engagement, focusing instead on autocrats' commitment (and violation) of treaties protecting civil, political, and physical integrity rights. Yet existing explanations for autocrats' ratification of these treaties—such as appeasing domestic opposition groups—do not necessarily apply to women's rights (von Stein 2013). As authoritarian international law is increasingly viewed as an important area of study (Ginsburg 2020), scholars should explore how authoritarian regimes navigate participation regarding women's rights issues, including their engagement with the main women's rights treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). After taking a closer look at how autocracies shape, commit, and challenge women's rights internationally, we suggest several research directions to build this area of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important developments in international law for the protection of displaced women and girls—the implied non-refoulement obligation in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has received little scholarly or jurisprudential attention. This Article presents, for the first time, a doctrinal analysis of the full corpus of asylum complaints decided by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Committee). It analyzes the early development of a prohibition on return to real, personal, and foreseeable risks of serious forms of discrimination against women; highlights critical shortcomings in the Committee's asylum practice; identifies key areas for improvement; and reflects on the Committee's as-yet-unrealized potential to contribute to international law in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women with a Declaration (CEDAW) to Article 5(a) stating that it will implement the principle on gender-based equality only to the extent of non-interference in the personal affairs of its religious communities. The due diligence obligation in the CEDAW, which was adopted through General Recommendation No. 19 in 1992, normatively expanded Article 5 to imply an obligation on nation states to redress traditional cultural attitudes that cause gender-based violence. This article argues that the cultural nature of GBV in India converts the Declaration of India into an inconsistent reservation under public international law. This implies that India's Declaration is an egregious breach of the CEDAW's due diligence obligation. Accession to the CEDAW's Optional Protocol is advocated as a solution to this serious breach. Theoretical implications for the three-stage norm life cycle and epiphenomenal norms are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women face disproportionate challenges while undertaking coastal fieldwork. We draw on 18 responses that specifically raise fieldwork issues from an international survey about perceptions and experiences of gender inequality for those working in coastal sciences to discuss two common themes. These themes are barriers to fieldwork participation and challenges for women working in coastal field settings such as boats or working on beaches, including discrimination and sexual harassment. We suggest five priority behavioural and policy changes to improve the fieldwork experience for women in coastal sciences: (i) publicise field role models and trail blazers, (ii) improve opportunities and capacity for women to undertake fieldwork, (iii) establish field codes of conduct, (iv) acknowledge the challenges women face in the field and provide support where possible, and (v) foster an enjoyable and supportive fieldwork culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how women's descriptive representation affects legal gender equality of economic opportunity. Building on existing studies on women's descriptive and substantive representation, we argue that as the proportion of female legislators and ministers increases, legal gender equality of economic opportunity improves. Additionally, we expect that a country's institutional context significantly shapes the influence of women in different positions of power on legal gender equality. The higher the legislature's law-making power, the greater the effect of female legislators on legal gender equality; under the same condition, its relative influence compared to female cabinet ministers is also greater. Similarly, we hypothesize that the higher the level of democracy, the more effective female legislators compared to female ministers. To test these arguments, we draw on the database that provides cross-national information on legal discrimination against women in economic opportunities and provide supporting evidence for our arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the impact of professional networks on men's and women's earnings, using a dataset of European and North American executives. The size of an individual's network of influential former colleagues has a large positive association with remuneration, with an elasticity of around 21%. However, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity using various fixed effects as well as a placebo technique, we find that the real causal impact of networks is barely positive for men and significantly lower for women. We provide suggestive evidence indicating that the apparent discrimination against women is due to two factors: first, both men and women are helped more by own-gender than other-gender connections, and men have more of these than women do. Second, a subset of employers we identify as 'female friendly firms' recruit more women but reward networks less than other firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family systems shape social institutions, yet they are rarely considered in histories of economic development. In this article, we show that a suite of social conventions—such as age gaps at marriage, bride price, sequestration, and discrimination and violence against women—are overrepresented in polygamous societies as compared to monogamous societies. This dichotomy can be explained on the grounds that polygamy produces a chronic scarcity of marriageable females. We argue that this suite, which we call gamos and which we quantify by two different methods, has demonstrably significant consequences for social, institutional, and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are elected officials more responsive to men than women inquiring about access to government services? Women face discrimination in many realms of politics, but evidence is limited on whether such discrimination extends to interactions between women and elected officials. In recent years, several field experiments have examined public officials' responsiveness. The majority focused on racial bias in the USA, while the few experiments outside the USA were usually single-country studies. We explore gender bias with the first large-scale audit experiment in five countries in Europe (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Netherlands) and six in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay). A citizen alias whose gender is randomized contacts members of parliament about unemployment benefits or healthcare services. The results are surprising. Legislators respond significantly more to women (+3% points), especially in Europe (+4.3% points). In Europe, female legislators in particular reply substantially more to women (+8.4% points). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 20th century, society's view on sexualities has undergone a severe paradigm shift. While moving away from ideas of decency and bawdiness to evaluate legitimate sexuality, concepts of autonomy and consent gained importance. This transformation is also challenging the law. With the broad acceptance of various forms of sexual behavior and sexual orientation, legal regulation based on morality and ethics is outdated. Recent debates on law and sexualities focus on sexual autonomy and its conditions. This is shown especially by the legal debate on sexual violence and criminal law. But the right to sexual autonomy does not only require adequate protection against sexual violence. As a human right, it obliges State Parties to Human Rights Treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to respect, protect, and fulfill sexual autonomy. This includes the guarantee of freedom from sexual violence, coercion and discrimination, as well as control over one's own body and over the involvement in sexual interactions with others. In order to ensure the different components of sexual autonomy, sexual education and reliable access to information and medical services are necessary. This paper presents an approach concerning the multifaceted dimensions of sexual autonomy through a human rights lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging area of philosophy of birth is invaluable, first, to diagnose fallacious assumptions about the relation between the womb and reason, and, ultimately, to challenge potentially damaging narratives with major impact on birth care. With its analysis of eighteenth-century epistemic and medical discussions about the role of the uterus in women's reasoning (or lack of reasoning), this article supports two arguments: first, that women's "flawed thinking" was a premise drawn by many modern intellectual men, one that was presented as based upon empirical evidence; and second, that the pervasive construction of the uterus as an element that renders women wild, uncontrollable, and irrational continues to influence contemporary obstetrics (and maybe even to nurture obstetric violence), even as today's medicine and science consider themselves to be free of any such prejudices. This article shows the role that Giacomo Casanova played in debunking these prejudices and presents his short manuscript on the issue as an important contribution to the literature of the Enlightenment, with its argument against women's supposed "natural" inferiority and for the idea that differences in education (rather than anatomical differences) were to blame for women's subordinate position in society. Detailed analysis of the "thinking uterus" debate illuminates the different ways in which various arguments from/by the "anti-uterine" lobby were used to justify the subordination of women: sometimes emphasizing the connection between the uterus and thought and sometimes negating it, but always concluding that women's inferiority is to be found in some known or yet-to-be-discovered anatomical, and mainly sexual, deficiency or problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is possible to identify gendered disadvantage at almost every point in a migrant woman's journey, physical and legal, from country of origin to country of destination, from admission to naturalization. Rules which explicitly distribute migration opportunities differently on the grounds of sex/gender, such as prohibitions on certain women's emigration, may produce such disadvantage. Women may also, however, be disadvantaged by facially gender-neutral rules. Examples of indirectly disadvantageous provisions include those which classify certain forms of labor as either "low-" or "high-" skilled, using this categorization to distribute migration opportunities differentially. Such rules may disproportionately affect the mostly female workers whose labor in certain fields is considered "low-skilled" in comparison to that undertaken by their predominantly male, "high-skilled" counterparts. Scholars have identified the diverse ways in which states' immigration and nationality laws continue to involve gendered and racialized exclusion, subordination, and violence. Migration control practices, including those concerned with deterrence, detention, and deportation, have also been impugned on these bases. This essay draws on this literature to examine whether rules that produce gendered disadvantage are open to challenge under the international legal regime charged with eradicating discrimination against women, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on recent accounts of diffuse and complex agentic practices in the global South by drawing on ethnographic data gathered in northwestern Ghana among the Dagaaba. Contemporary feminist discourses and theories, particularly in contexts in the global South, have sought to draw attention to the multifaceted ways in which women exercise agency in these contexts. Practices that in the past were perceived as instruments of women's subordination or as re-inscribing their oppression have been re/interpreted as agentic. Agentic practices are theorized in more fluid terms than the binary pairing of agent/victim debates permit. Dagaaba contexts are deeply pervaded by beliefs in supernatural power forms, and these forces dis/empower certain forms of agentic acts. This article demonstrates that key factors combining with male power to regulate women's exercise of agency are perceived mystical forces. I argue that, in order not to risk missing agency—or rather "misdescribing" it—in the context of Dagaaba and most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where the belief in mystical forces is profoundly pervasive, the role of these power forms as important determinants of the form that agentic practices assume—and more broadly, the way power works—needs critical attention in feminist theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the modern kitchen as a technological artefact and a mechanism through which the postcolonial Singaporean state and agents of household consumerism such as advertisers, retailers, home economists, and social scientists constructed the image of a modern Singaporean woman. By revealing how the female consumer-cum-homemaker became a symbol of material success and middle-class status in Fordist Singapore, the article highlights two types of domestication: the subordination of women to the patriarchal imperatives of family and nation, and the transformation of hard successes in the economy into soft comforts in the kitchen. This article suggests that although the state had narrowed the gap between popular expectations for improved living standards and its ability to fulfil them, it also unwittingly enmeshed definitions of femininity, womanhood, and female citizenship in a series of contradictions and tensions that had implications for contemporary Singaporean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread adoption of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) represents a puzzle. It cannot be described as serving the interests of any state as understood in conventional theories of international relations because it commits countries to radical social change. Yet all but six UN member states have ratified it. We argue that the case can only be explained by reference to Waltz' first image, the individual level. We invoke Giddens' notion of structuration to explain how a small group of like-minded women, many of them diplomats, were able to work within existing structures of international diplomacy to create institutions that embedded their ideals in international law. These women were critical actors, positioned simultaneously in activist organizations and government and diplomatic institutions, giving them leverage to institutionalize new norms. The case shows the importance of analysis at the individual level to explain normative change in the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miranda Fricker's account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recognition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker's account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker's theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory can give a name to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call "self-recognition" provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies the factors that contribute to the successful implementation of intersectionality in European multilevel legal praxis through the analysis of the case B.S. v. Spain. Combining critical legal analysis of the main judicial documents with qualitative methodology from political science based on in‐depth interviews with key actors involved in the case, we uncover the obstacles and opportunities existing at the national and supra‐national levels for the implementation of intersectionality. We decipher the factors contributing to the exceptional success of this case through the conjoint analysis of macro, meso, and micro levels. Our analysis shows that a combination of the legal provisions, paradigms and structures, the roles of the different actors involved, and the applicant's subjective position made it possible to put intersectionality in practice. This study provides novel empirical evidence that contributes to advancing the theoretical debate about intersectionality implementation in the multilevel European context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do international treaties lead to cross-national increases in women's rights? In contrast to Asal, Brown, and Figueroa's (2008) suggestion that the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is not an important factor in explaining the liberalization of abortion rights polices, this article argues that the treaty contributes to increases in abortion rights when the terms of ratification are disaggregated. Previous excursions into this question have only considered whether a state has ratified the treaty, which is problematic from both a methodological and theoretical standpoint given that many states ratified with conditions, while only six states did not ratify at all. Additionally, some states ratified the Optional Protocol and some have not. We demonstrate that the disaggregation of levels of treaty ratification is associated with increases in women's rights in a model replicating that of Asal, Brown, and Figueroa. Further, we extend our knowledge of the dynamics of treaty ratification through the use of structural equations to more fully model how political, cultural, and economic factors, as well as exogenous international pressures, interact to produce changes in women's rights around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how anticipated age discrimination in the form of disparate treatment induces behavior that in effect constitutes gender discrimination. Potential employers often exhibit a common pattern of behavior that acts to discriminate against older workers entering a specific workplace. Women, at a decision-making point early in their lives, are aware of this pattern of discrimination. They perceive that it is important for them to establish their careers before they have a family because it will be more difficult for them to enter the work force at a later age and excel at their careers. This anticipated age discrimination disparately impacts women, resulting in gender discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars consider Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist political theorist for two reasons: (1) her explicit commitment to educational equality, and (2) her implicit suggestion that the private‐sphere role of motherhood holds political import. My reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman uses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft to connect these points: educated women are better at performing motherly duties and, therefore, of greater benefit to society. Although many scholars have read Wollstonecraft's arguments for educational equality as a starting point for greater equality, Bergès does not. In this article, I further Bergès's claims and argue that Wollstonecraft's project is limited and likely to reinforce inequality between the sexes. Specifically, I show that Wollstonecraft's educational reforms incentivize women to become nothing more than highly educated housewives. In the process of fulfilling their social and political duty to instill public spirit and private virtue in future citizens, women are re‐entrenched in domestic affairs instead of being freed for public pursuits. This realization, I contend, should cause us to be wary of panaceas for women's subordination that rest on increasing their education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court in Judgment No. 1263/2018, recognizing, for the first time, the binding character of the Views of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee), augmented the normative authority of the Views of the human rights treaty monitoring body, not only at the domestic level, but also within the international legal sphere. In the Judgment, the Spanish highest court held that the government must comply with the Views of the CEDAW Committee as a matter of the state's constitutional mandate as well as its international obligations. The Court's interpretation in this case meets the expectation of human rights treaty monitoring bodies that states are obligated to respond to their Views concerning individual communications, despite some states parties' claims to the contrary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the use of comparison in establishing multi-ground claims of intersectional discrimination. Leading examples of test cases from the US and the UK exemplify the challenges in using comparison to establish discrimination against Black women, based on the grounds of both race and sex. These challenges include: the insistence on using a single mirror comparator (viz white men) or the difficulties in choosing multiple comparators from a range of options (viz white women, Asian women, Black men, white men etc); the missing rationale for the selection; and the unwieldiness in actually appreciating the nature of intersectional discrimination based on this exercise. To overcome these, Canadian courts have relaxed the strict requirement of necessarily resorting to comparison for proving discrimination and switched to the flexible approach. However, in practice, flexible approach appears as fastidious as strict comparison in its selection and use of comparators. Thus, neither of the two approaches has been too helpful in supporting intersectional claims. The article argues that instead, a useful way of proving intersectional discrimination is to follow the South African approach of making comparisons contextually: (i) between all relevant comparators, identified in reference to one, some, and all of the grounds or personal characteristics; and (ii) sifting through comparative evidence with the purpose of establishing similar and different patterns of group disadvantage which characterise the nature of intersectional discrimination. This approach brings both principle and purpose to employing comparison and can be especially useful in appreciating intersectional discrimination as based on multiple grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of the international norms in domestic politics is a central question in international relations. This article examines the major international treaty on the human rights of women, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and its impact on Italian politics, specifically on domestic legislation, case law and civil society activism, and institutional structure. The research contributes to the general debate on international norms diffusion and implementation, and identifies the factors which enable states to comply with these norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the perennial debate over the origins and nature of female power by examining the significance of ‘Women of Discord’ in Aztec (more properly, Mexica) culture. Influential, but often troublesome, these formidable figures embody the complex significance of female power, rooted in women's privileged access to the awesome earth forces through childbirth. This chaotic energy lent cosmological and dynastic significance to the mytho-historical Women of Discord, but also led to a persistent female association with disorder which had tangible (and often overlooked) consequences for the lives of ‘real’ women in Aztec culture. This article explores the ways in which beliefs about the female capacity for disruption both reflected and shaped reality, ensnaring all women in a cycle of myth and history which made femininity a source of both authority and apprehension. Importantly, in Tenochtitlan ideas about ‘disorderly women’ did not lead inevitably to their practical subordination or suppression; women held practical markers of influence and esteem in Aztec culture. Thus, the Women of Discord challenge our assumptions about gender by offering a distinctive perspective on the ways in which femininity and fertility may be seen as disruptive, without necessarily debasing women or depriving them of individual agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stigma and discrimination within health care settings remain a public health challenge across diverse cultural environments and may have deleterious effects on mental and physical health. This study explores the causes, forms and consequences of HIV-related stigma and discrimination among migrant sub-Saharan African women living with HIV in Belgium. A qualitative study was conducted with 44 HIV-positive sub-Saharan African migrant women between April 2013 and December 2014 in health care settings in Belgium. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis. Twenty-five of the women reported overt stigma and discrimination and fifteen reported witnessing behaviours that they perceived to be stigmatizing and discriminatory in health care settings. The themes that emerged as to the causes of stigma and discrimination were: public perceptions of migrants and HIV, fear of contamination and institutional policies on HIV management. Reported forms of stigma and discrimination included: delayed or denied care, excessive precautions, blame and humiliation. The consequences of stigma and discrimination were: emotional stress, inconsistent health-care-seeking behaviour and non-disclosure to non-HIV treating personnel. Stigma and discrimination in health care settings towards people with HIV, and more specifically towards HIV-positive sub-Saharan African migrant women, impedes sustainable preventive measures. Specialized education and training programmes for non-HIV health care providers require in-depth investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quota laws have been widely adopted in Latin America, with significant increases in the number of women elected to parliament in some countries. However, it is far from clear whether the laws have produced the modifications in the gender regimes which inform internal party power structures and dynamics that would allow women to participate – as aspirants or selectors – on an equal footing with their male counterparts in the processes of candidate selection. This article seeks to identify critical nodes where the interplay between the different institutions – systemic, normative and practical – of candidate selection intersects with gendered power relations to facilitate or hinder not only women’s access to elective posts, but the terms of their access. Employing a feminist institutionalist analytical framework, this article presents the findings from qualitative case study research on candidate selection in Uruguay in 2009 and 2014 and situates them within the existing – albeit small – body of studies of gender and candidate selection in the Latin American region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting from the Medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of villages over a period of six centuries (thirteenth-nineteenth). Based on this original dataset, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change in which gender-biased inheritance systems emerged as a defensive measure to preserve the wealth of village insiders. This institutional change also had implications for the population growth, marriage strategies, and the protection from economic shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how McCann's theory on legal mobilization and social change is generalizable to the legal decisions of agencies. I demonstrate how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) routinely delayed and denied Title VII employment rights on the basis of sex and how this resulted in the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to ensure that the sex provision of Title VII was enforced. The article also discusses the influence of NOW in shaping the first years of Title VII law and the organization's role in reversing EEOC decisions denying rights under the sex provision of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the institutional nature of war and offers anthropological suggestions on the origins of war. It states that the practice of polygyny would have been a contributing factor towards war in prehistoric times. Topics include discrimination and exploitation against women, Genghis Khan of Mongolia and the indigenous Indian tribe Yanomamo from the Amazon rainforest between Venezuela and Brazil.

Efforts to understand the political implications of categorical prejudices—like racism and sexism—are complicated by the intersectional nature of social groups. Evaluating attitudes toward members of a single social category (e.g., African-Americans) in isolation can produce misleading conclusions, as racial cues commonly coincide with gender cues and create meaningful subgroups (McConnaughy and White 2014). The idea that different subgroups of women experience distinctive forms of discrimination is reflected in the concept of “double jeopardy.” Double jeopardy suggests that black and Hispanic women experience discrimination differently from white women or men of color because they simultaneously belong to a low-status gender group and a low-status racial/ethnic group (King 1988; Levin et al. 2002; cf. Sidanius and Veniegas 2000). As a result, women who are racial or ethnic minorities face a cumulative discrimination that extends beyond racism or sexism alone (King 1988; Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach 2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the 113th Congress convened in January 2013, women occupied only 17.9% of the 435 seats in the U.S. House, ranking the United States 80th globally in terms of the percentage of women serving in the lower legislative assembly. The underrepresentation of women is particularly puzzling, as political scientists since the 1990s have consistently shown that women candidates are not of demonstrably less quality than men on average (see Fulton 2012, 2014; Fulton et al. 2006; Lawless and Fox 2010), do not suffer from a gender-related funding disadvantage (Berch 1996; Burrell 2008; Gaddie and Bullock 1995; Fox 2010; Herrick 1995, 1996), and do about as well as men at the polls, accounting for differences in incumbency status (Fox 2010; Smith and Fox 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In LC v Peru, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women held that Peru was in breach of its obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women when it denied a 13 year old girl emergency surgery as well as an abortion. This commentary discusses the human rights significance of LC v Peru, especially in relation to the advancement of abortion jurisprudence in the African region. It is submitted that LC v Peru makes an important contribution towards the development of abortion laws that are transparent and accountable to women, as well as responsive to equal protection under the law. The duty of states to operationalize LC v Peru in their domestic law is an innovative juridical resource for reforming abortion laws. This is particularly so in those regions, including the African region, where the continued criminalization of abortion serves as a significant incentive for unsafe, illegal abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the 45 Muslim majority countries in the world, 42 have signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. While this does indeed signal a motive to improve women's rights, there is wide disparity in terms of which countries expand rights and which do not. Social science literature suggests that in addition to economic factors like wealth and oil resources, or political factors like the quality of democracy in the country, Islamic culture may be at odds with the Western conception of women's rights. We posit that Muslim countries are unique in this regard due to religious pressures that often conflict with conventional measures of human rights. Using data from the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Dataset and the Religion and State Project, we find that Muslim countries that restrict the influence of fundamentalist religion in the government and population improve women's economic and social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Claiming the rights of women in a world of blatant gender hierarchies is an international feminist strategy that has been around for a long time. Rhetorically, it has been part of the human rights framework since its very inception, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 already contains important elements of gender equality, thanks to the lobbying efforts of a handful of women's rights advocates at the time. But it took the wave of global consciousness regarding gender inequality that swept the world in the 1970s to make women's rights relevant enough to codify them in a human rights treaty: the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). A decade and a half later, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights (1993) coined the slogan “women's rights are human rights” and thus emphasized the centrality of women's experiences for a holistic understanding of human rights. In the time since then, the human rights discourse has become increasingly intersectional and inclusive. While the scope and content of human rights remain contested, many women's rights activists around the world rely on this framework in their struggles for global justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1997, an unprecedented number of female MPs—120—were elected to the UK House of Commons, doubling the numbers of female representatives overnight. Of these, 101 came from a single party: Labour. They entered a political institution that had hitherto been massively male-dominated (even in 1997, their number counted less than 20%) and famed for its historic traditions dominated by masculinized structures and norms (Lovenduski 2005; 2010). Many of the newly elected Labour women were known to each other, having already shared experiences of passing through their party's internal selection processes over the preceding years. Many broadly shared the same views of what the Labour party should stand for, ideologically speaking, and most were attitudinally feminist (Childs 2004). The mass media at the time of the general election, and thereafter, routinely constituted them as a collective entity—Blair's Babes—and the specifically right-wing media regularly subjected them to highly gendered criticism (Childs 2008, 140–165). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gendered division of labor is the major cause of gender inequality with respect to the broad spectrum of resources, occupations, and roles. Although many feminists aspire to an equality of outcome where there are no significant patterns of gender difference across these dimensions, many have also argued that liberal theories of social justice do not have the conceptual tools to justify a direct attack on the gendered division of labor. Indeed, many critics argue that liberalism positively condones it, presuming that it arises from the free choices of individuals, which must be respected. In this paper I will accept the feminist goal of equality of outcome across roles, occupations, income, and wealth, but will argue that liberal theories of justice are consistent with strong measures aimed at promoting such equality. I will show that liberalism has the conceptual resources to justify a concrete policy measure that goes considerably beyond the measures usually championed by feminists. The example I focus on is 'daddy quotas,' which refers to the tagging of a significant part of parental leave for the exclusive use of fathers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have documented substantial penalties associated with motherhood and suggest that discrimination plays an important role in producing them. In this article, I argue that the degree to which motherhood is conceptualized as a choice affects the penalties associated with making this choice. Two methods are employed to evaluate this argument. The first method is an analysis of state differences in the wage penalties for motherhood, in which hierarchical linear modeling is used with data from the 1988-2004 Current Population Survey. The second method is a hiring experiment in a highly controlled setting. The wage analysis shows that, net of the usual individual and state-level factors that affect wages, mothers are penalized more in states where motherhood is perceived to be a woman's choice. The hiring experiment distinguishes between productivity-based and discrimination-based explanations for the penalty and provides strong evidence for a causal relationship between perceptions of choice and discrimination against mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions about the quality of political representation are central to research on women and gender, and to political science in general. Given a certain set of interests, how well do political institutions and political actors address and advance those interests? Research about the quality of political representation relies a priori on the existence of fixed, stable, and measurable interests; we need to know what women want before we can assess how well politicians represent them. Perfect measures of the interests that all women share have proven elusive. The measures of women's interests that scholars commonly employ lend themselves reasonably well to research, but have unfortunate side effects: They essentialize gender norms, exclude certain groups of women, or define women's interests too narrowly. In this essay, I explore the political implications of the empirical measures of women's interests on which scholars have relied in research on women's political representation. I offer a way to measure women's interests that draws upon the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW provides a way to think about women's interests that is broad, inclusive, and sufficiently flexible to reflect changes over time. Furthermore, it enjoys the explicit approval of almost every nation in the world; 186 countries have ratified CEDAW since the UN General Assembly approved it in 1979. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Feminist critics of the stigmatization of prostitution such as Martha Nussbaum and Sybil Schwarzenbach argue that the features of the practice do not, or at least need not, differ essentially from those of other more respected sorts of labor. I argue that even the least degraded forms of the current practice of prostitution remain objectionable on feminist grounds because patrons demand a semblance of sexual self-expression that engages discriminatory beliefs about women's sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the impact of gender in judicial campaigns and elections. It explores the challenges faced by aspiring women judges competing in judicial elections. As stated, several regression findings have suggested that women face little or no discrimination and that gender has a minimal effect in the judicial electoral process. However, the study of Richard Fox and colleagues in 2004 recommended a new approach which found women facing challenges like raising money and winning votes.

Studies of press coverage afforded women running for public office indicate that historically, women tend to garner less coverage overall and that the coverage they do receive tends to focus disproportionately on their appearance, personality, and family status at the expense of their qualifications and issue positions. This study examines newspaper coverage of U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Notably, Clinton did not allege that she was receiving too little coverage or coverage that focused disproportionately on her clothing or appearance. Rather, she charged that she was being treated negatively relative to her chief rival, U.S. Senator Barack Obama. More than 6,000 articles from 25 leading newspapers from across the country were content-coded from Labor Day through Super Tuesday in order to assess Clinton's coverage on two dimensions: traditional and tonal. On a range of traditional indicators of bias, such as coverage amount and mentions of candidate appearance, Clinton's coverage clearly broke established patterns typically afforded women presidential candidates. However, the tone of Clinton's coverage was decidedly negative relative to her male competitors. Normative implications of this mixed bag of fairness and bias are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the different electoral reform projects proposed since the turn of the millennium in Canadian provinces and the territory of Nunavut, in order to reveal what accommodation they have made to the objective of increasing the feminization of legislative assemblies. My guiding idea is that most reform proposals have given no, or sometimes peripheral, emphasis to this question but have never made it a central issue. However, Quebec and, even more, Nunavut stand out for the attention that they have paid to the absence of women from the political scene, and their reform proposals have included responses that might offer a solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using survey data from 900 rural households, this article assesses the degree to which Soviet-era workplace inequality between rural males and females has been remediated by the introduction of democratic and market reforms. The overall effects of reform institutions are mixed. Concerning male-female workplace inequality, three continuities were found with the Soviet period. First, rural males have larger total incomes than do rural females. Second, equal pay for equal work does not exist: females holding similar positions to males earned less in all categories of employment. In addition, males continue to dominate numerically the ranks of farm managers and leaders. Third, managers and leaders of both sexes are the most entrepreneurial, measured by income from private business. Male managers, however, have over three times the income from private business as do female managers. Concerning intragender inequality, it was found that females with advanced education and specialized knowledge or skills have significantly higher incomes than women with lower skill sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]