Chapter 3: The Consequences of Gender for Women's Political Leadership

Georgia Duerst-Lahti

The consequences of gender for women's political leadership To reconstitute political institutions is one thing; to reconstitute a society and its culture quite another. The first seems unattainable and the second seems inconceivable. Thus, that which lies within ourselves also cuts against our grain—ensuring, I suspect, that the leadership question will remain both centrally important and only rarely answered . —Bert Rockman, The Leadership Question , 1984 Gender is not synonymous with women, nor is it simply the social construction of biological sex (Butler, 1990). As a result, to explore the consequences of gender for women in political leadership is to look beyond the usual sex variable on a survey. It is to take gender as a category of analysis seriously and particularly to recognize the contributions feminist theorists have made to the discipline, something political scientists have been slow to do. Although recent work suggests progress, political scientists still ...

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