Electoral reforms tend to come in waves, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s the reform to ride was the gender quota. Whether implemented voluntarily by individual political parties, through legislative reform, or by constitutional amendment, more than 160 countries adopted some form of gender quota, mandating power sharing across the sexes. Depending on the level of government at which the quota is implemented, the numerical floor for representation it specifies, and the incentives and sanctions that it imposes to induce compliance, the impact of quota laws on women’s numerical representation varies from marginal to immense, but it has never been zero or negative. For many card-carrying feminists, this is a win in and of itself, regardless of what the women installed in office accomplish thereafter. But scholars and advocates have wondered whether getting women into positions of power matters for the nature of governance, for policy making, and for the lives of women citizens. Ana Catalano Weeks’s thoughtful, readable new book argues that it does.
Making Gender Salient analyzes the impact of quota laws—quotas that are adopted nationally and applied evenly to all parties—on the representational connection between women in politics and gendered policy domains. Weeks argues that quotas can impact policies in three ways. First, by getting more women into power, quotas can give a coalition of women legislative leverage to push or approve legislation. Second, since parliamentary election is generally a precondition for higher levels of leadership, increased representation of women can put more women in line for ministerial positions where they can wield real power. Finally, since quota adoption itself is often predicated on arguments that women can and should represent women, debates surrounding quota policies can make space to put gender-specific issues on the political table. Weeks argues that together, these three factors—leverage, leadership, and mission salience—make quotas matter for gender equality.
In OECD democracies, the site of Weeks’s investigation, most national-level quota laws were adopted after some parties (generally from the left) had already implemented party-level quotas. Mechanically, then, the biggest gains in women’s representation from national-level quota-law adoption take place within more conservative, and Christian Democratic, parties. Weeks argues that this distributional consequence of quota-law adoption leads to a theoretical expectation about which types of policies are most likely to be affected by the increase in women’s representation: quotas should be most influential in policy areas where there is a gender gap in preferences and where some consensus exists among women across party lines. When such consensus exists, women legislators can work across their aisles to draw attention and devote legislative time to policies that their male counterparts might not have considered.
Identifying which issues are important to women across parties is no easy feat. Drawing on multiple sources of survey data from the mid-1980s until 2012, including three waves each of the International Social Survey Programme’s Role of Government Survey and its Family and Changing Gender Roles Survey, as well as three waves of the European Values Survey, Weeks identifies consistent, and growing, gender gaps in a variety of domains. These include the long-standing area of spending (women want more spending on health, retirement, unemployment, and education than men), government intervention in the economy (women are more supportive of price-control measures intended to reduce inequality), and women’s social roles (women think working mothers can be warm toward their children, that women do not prefer the home, that it is not strictly a man’s job to earn money, and that preschool children do not suffer if a mother works). The most persistent of these gender gaps in public opinion is related to survey questions that ask whether children suffer if mothers work. In all countries but Italy—with the Nordic countries in the lead and Spain and Japan at the tail—women are likelier to disagree with this statement than men. Across parties, women typically think that women can work and not harm their children by doing so. The policy domain related to work–family policies is therefore ripe for producing the kind of reform predicted by Weeks’s conceptualization of the impact of quotas.
To take one example, in Belgium before quotas, the various parties did not agree on the need for gender-neutral parental leave or paternity leave. Some left parties did support leave after childbirth, but only for women. Parties on the right supported flexible working hours, family allowances, and tax breaks for large families, which all deprioritize women’s work in favor of a single male breadwinner. After the quota law, however, convergence emerged, and half of the Belgian parties emphasized the importance of parental leave for working parents in their platforms. Even the far right supported more affordable and accessible childcare, a major shift in their rhetoric from the 1990s. In Austria, on the other hand, which did not adopt a quota in the same period, only the left-leaning parties began to emphasize paternal involvement in child rearing, while no parties on the right took such steps. A later extension of an even longer maternity leave when the Christian Democrats were in a coalition with a far-right party was considered a step backward in the struggle for gender equality.
Making Gender Salient examines one of the most important feminist research questions—does having more women in charge bring policy change?—by engaging not only with numbers, but also with people. Weeks’s extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews with women in power provide invaluable insights into the tensions between partisan loyalty and the shared aims of women across parties. And the book’s modular framework should be adaptable by other scholars interested in studying the impact of major transitions in descriptive representation. It is a must-read for anyone interested in identity and representation.
The book also raises several questions that might pique the interest of future researchers. As we saw above, quotas were most effective in increasing the number of conservative women in office, and the policy gains from quotas were limited to those areas in which a gender gap in policy preferences existed among all parties. But even in the issue area ripest for cross-party women’s collaboration, maternal employment, only 33% of conservative women in Weeks’s 15-country dataset actually disagreed with the statement that young children were harmed when mothers worked outside the home. The existence of a gender gap does not, then, necessarily imply agreement among women of different political persuasions. This suggests that the policy effects of quotas in other OECD countries may be limited by sharp differences of opinion between conservative and liberal women.
A second question concerns the relationship between gender quotas, the representation of women in legislatures, and policy making. Since the mere presence of women in the legislature opens the way for cross-party coalition building, we might ask whether a major shock to representation that increased conservative women’s representation would lead to more woman-friendly legislation even absent a quota. While Weeks engages in structured comparison between countries that had similar representational profiles, but where only one adopted the quota (e.g., Belgium versus Austria, Portugal versus Italy), future scholars might look to compare countries that had major shifts in conservative women’s representation and did not adopt quotas to those that did. This could further drive home the importance of gender salience as opposed to descriptive representation in securing collaboration for gender-equal policy reform.
Third, we might ask whether the set of issues on which women legislators collaborate will narrow or expand as quotas become entrenched in political systems. On the pessimistic side, as memories of the hard-fought battles for the quota recede into the past, new cohorts of women legislators may downplay the importance of the quota for securing their position, decreasing the possibility of collaboration based on gender. Or, if male politicians delegitimate the presence of women as a mere artifact of their power-sharing arrangement, new generations of quota-elected women might feel the need to hew even more to the party line just to prove their mettle. (Although, nota bene, they should not bother: all the studies of post-quota candidate quality show that it is the mediocre male rump that gets sliced off and replaced by a flank of highly skilled women.)
More optimistically, if quotas make gender salient in a variety of arenas within legislatures, future cohorts of women legislators may feel greater authority to speak out on women’s issues, even if they hail from conservative delegations. This might shift the distribution of women’s preferences across parties to be more in line with one another. Over time, the domains of agreement could expand, creating more opportunities for gender-equal legislation. The fact that women in parties across the board continue to support the existence of the quota, even when their parties are not in favor, gives us one inkling that the future may be female.
