Still a ‘Male Business’? Explaining Women’s Presence in Executive Office

Abstract

This article aims to account for cross-national and over-time variation in women’s participation in cabinets. Specifically, it focuses on some key political factors which have not been tested yet, such as the effectiveness of party gender quotas. Previous literature has mainly centred on structural variables, such as the degree of democratisation and economic development. Using an original longitudinal cross-sectional sample of 23 advanced industrial democracies, this article provides new evidence that some important political factors should be considered. It finds that countries with a specialist system have a higher percentage of women in cabinet than generalist systems, left-wing parties in government appoint more women, women are more likely to receive a ministerial post when the governing party has adopted gender quotas, and an increasing number of women in parliament boosts women in cabinet. Furthermore, the article shows that these political variables perform differently through time, and that political factors have become more relevant in recent decades.

Acknowledgements

I thank Tània Verge for her comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Claire Annesley, Susan Franceschet, Abel Escribà, Toni Rodon and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Notes

1. The Times, ‘Silvio Berlusconi Angers Spain for Mocking Female Cabinet’, 17 April 2008.

2. Although the governing party’s parliamentary group does not act as an independent actor, it will only promote policy initiatives when the government actually supports them.

3. A president or prime minister selects cabinet members, not an electoral system. An electoral system only can have an effect in determining the number of women in parliament.

4. With the exception of nationality or age requirements.

5. It is a 0–100 scale composed of five items where respondents are required to answer whether they agree or disagree with the following statements: ‘On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do’, ‘When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women’, ‘A university education is more important for a boy than a girl’, ‘A woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled’, and ‘A woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn’t want to have a stable relationship with a man’.

6. Parties that value post-materialism (emphasising autonomy, environment and permissiveness in social policy) over materialism (stressing economic growth and security).

7. There are only five countries that have adopted legislative quotas: Belgium (1994), France (2002), Greece (2009), Portugal (2006) and Spain (2007). As it is a longitudinal dataset, it ultimately only counted nine observations out of 203, and this is not enough cases to establish robust conclusions.

8. Although some authors argue that attitudes affect the proportion of women in parliaments (Rudein 2012).

9. There are 10 countries are classified as are generalist systems, whereas 12 countries are included in the specialist systems. All presidential and semi-presidential systems are classified as specialist. Generalist: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand. Specialist: Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxemburg, Netherland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, USA.

10. Three polynomial time variables were included in the model: time (year-1980), time² and time³, the results with these variables were similar to obtained results.

11. It should be noted that various interaction effects have been tested in all the models reported, with no significant results. In particular, no significant interaction was observed between coalition and party ideology, type of government (minority/majority status) and coalition or type of recruitment and percentage of women in parliament.

12. In order to distinguish more accurately the effects of ideology and party quotas, which are correlated, an interaction has been introduced. This interaction term does not reach statistical significance, meaning that the effect of party quotas is not different across party ideology, although it should also be noted that very few right-wing parties have adopted quotas.