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The article attempts to account for the cross-national and cross-temporal patterns of government action on violence against women. It focuses on the interaction between the mobilization of women's movements and the institutional context. However, it argues the balance of domestic and international factors varied in different regions and over time. It cites an international norm developed treating violence against women as a fundamental question of human rights between 1975 and 2005.

This study applies and evaluates the framework for analyzing government action on women’s rights developed by Htun and Weldon (2007) in the Nigerian context. Examining a variety of areas of .x000d.women’s rights (including abortion, family law, violence against women, quotas, and constitutional equality), this framework for a comparative politics of sexual equality explains why different factors .x000d.explain change on different women’s rights issues. As the most populous nation in Africa and one that is nearly 50% Christian and 50% Muslim, Nigeria is .x000d.an important case study when comparing policy issues on a more global scale. As a young democracy, Nigeria presents an opportunity to .x000d.examine how federalism and a complex legal system (civil, customary, and religious/sharia) affect policy change for women's rights. This case study included more than forty interviews with Nigerian .x000d.government officials, NGO directors, activists, and scholars. The paper evaluates how well the framework accounts for the Nigerian context, with some reference to the broader African context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain variation in gender equality policies across countries and across issues. We show that policies promoting sex equality seek fundamental social change. They challenge historical patterns of state-society interaction concerning the organization of the economy, the respective roles of the state, religion, and cultural groups, and the authority of the state to protect citizen rights. Contradictions in these patterns lead progressive actors--such as women's movements, leftist parties, and international organizations—to contest the status quo and demand reform. Their struggle for change is constrained and mediated by structural features of the national polity and the core imperatives of the state. In this paper, we develop two central arguments that flow from this approach. The first is that gender equality is not one issue but many. It is a complex concept shaped by different mechanisms of injustice and oppression (Fraser 1990, 1995, 2007; Young 1990, 2000; 2005). From this follows the second argument: different gender equality policies follow distinctive logics of change. Models helpful to explain change on violence against women do not apply to change on abortion or parental leave, for example. The role of actors like women's movements and religious organizations is different and the weight of contextual factors (such as degree of democracy or GDP per capita) also varies. We propose a typology of policies based on two dimensions: 1) whether the policy improves women's lives as a status group or whether it addresses class inequalities among women (status versus class policies) and 2) whether or not the policy challenges the doctrine of the dominant religion or the codified tradition of a major cultural group (doctrinal versus non-doctrinal policies). Each policy type involves different actors and engenders distinct political dynamics. As a result, we predict that different factors and actors will be significant for each area. Using principal components analysis and OLS regression, we test these hypotheses against an original dataset of gender equality policies in 71 countries.The paper studies four policy areas, each of which represents one category of our typology: violence against women (VAW), abortion law, public funding for reproductive rights, and parental leave. (The complete dataset covers a total of 13 policy areas.) Principal components analysis supports the first hypothesis. Three underlying dimensions—defined primarily by the generosity of parental leave, VAW, and abortion, characterize the four policies. OLS regression confirms the second. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

abstract. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why hasn?t abortion been liberalized in Latin America? The first part of this article analyzes the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in an attempt to answer this question, focusing on the rise of the reproductive rights movement, activism of the Vatican and anti-abortion movements, and the peculiar sociology of abortion in the region. The next part explores how differences in the position of the president on abortion and the availability of congressional allies for the reproductive rights movement affected the political climate surrounding abortion in the three countries in the 1990s and early 2000s. In Brazil, the most liberal country, a ?legal abortion? movement has emerged to encourage public health services to perform abortions on women who have been raped. In Argentina, there is almost no discussion about liberalizing abortion, but conservative attempts to ban abortion under all circumstances have failed. Chile, where abortion is illegal under all circumstances, is completely closed to discussions about liberalizing abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the adverse impacts of harassment on career outcomes of women and racial minorities in academic engineering has been increasingly recognized. The way individuals define harassment has important implications for designing prevention programs and the ability of the engineering community to recognize and address this issue. This paper explores how undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty and staff in engineering define harassment in response to open-ended questions. The study is based on semi-structured individual interviews from 102 participants at two research universities in the United States. To build a comprehensive understanding of harassment, content analysis was used to identify themes in participants' responses. We also explored whether and how participants associate harassment with their own identity (e.g., gender, race). Participants recognized three overarching types of harassment: sexual (e.g., unwanted sexual attention), identity-based (e.g., race, gender), and general (i.e., neither sexual nor identity-based). Participants revealed a spectrum of behavioral indicators, including offensive language (e.g., comments, jokes), discrimination, and disrespectful behaviors. Whereas women and men perceived similar behaviors as indicators of harassment, the types of harassment were somewhat related to their social identity and status at the university (e.g., student, faculty). The implications of the findings for future research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender is a social position occupied by men and women and an attribute of social structures including the sexual division of labor, normative heterosexuality, and war and militarism. This paper focuses on the initiatives and responses that states take with regard to gender, race, and ethnicity. In particular, it explores 20th century efforts to improve the political presence of groups constituted by gender, culture, caste, and race in such countries as India, the United States, France, Brazil, and Rwanda. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this project, we aim to understand the conditions under which governments adopt policies that promote or undermine gender equality. Our objective is to develop and test an explanatory model of policymaking that reveals the heterogeneity of causal processes affecting different gender policy issue areas. We argue that the effects of religion, international norms, and gender-based political activism will differ depending on the issue, level of development, and degree of democratization. This helps to reconcile existing conflicts in the literature and illuminate the limits to accepted explanations. This project contributes a unique database covering a wide range of gender equality policies in 71 countries, including rich and poor, democratic and non democratic, and different cultural and religious traditions. This database will permit us and other scholars to elucidate the role of the state in the gender structuring of society as well as its potential to enforce equal rights. In addition, this work will help national governments, international institutions, and feminist and human rights organizations better understand the obstacles and opportunities to gender equality, enabling them to design better strategies on behalf of women. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies gender differences in policy attitudes among legislators and the mass electorate as well as the ways in which sex discrimination in congress thwarts effective performance of legislative duties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the Latin America trend toward quotas for women and minorities, paying particular attention to the differences between gender and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]