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Over the past 20 years here has been a proliferation around the world of parliamentary bodies with a gender equality mandate. Yet they are often overlooked because they don’t fit easily into existi...

In political science, the classic works on voting systems rarely noticed their impact on the representation of women. It was not until the 1980s that scholars showed that the type of electoral system was a key predictor of women’s legislative recruitment. This new knowledge was quickly taken up by those advising on policy for transitional democracies and by electoral reformers in the old democracies. In the 1990s, it was combined with knowledge of how quotas might increase women’s political representation—particularly when there was a good fit between quotas, the type of electoral system and party structures. Increased awareness of intersectionality made electoral system scholarship more complicated—for LGBTQ minorities first-past-the-post systems might offer greater rewards than proportional representation (PR).

This collection turns a spotlight on the transformations wrought by gender innovation in the social sciences. Eighteen short and accessibly written case studies show how feminist and gender perspectives bring new concepts, theories and policy solutions. Scholars in five disciplines—economics, history, philosophy, political science and sociology—demonstrate how paying attention to gender can sharpen the focus of the social sciences, improve the public policy they inform and change the way we look at things. Gender innovation provokes rethinking at both the core and the margins of established disciplines, sometimes developing new fields of research that chart new territory. These case studies celebrate the contribution of feminist and gender scholars and the impact of their work within and beyond the social sciences.

Until the 1970s neither Australian nor New Zealand political studies gave much attention to issues of diversity. This reflected both the makeup of the profession and the majoritarian nature of the political systems that was the major object of its attention. We argue that feminist organising on both sides of the Tasman had led to greater pluralism within the discipline. Using a comparative institutional approach, we trace the relationship between organising within the professional associations and the acceptance of greater diversity of approach and standpoint. We find, however, that while both countries’ Associations have become somewhat more inclusive, a hierarchy of knowledge still exists that may prove an obstacle to feminist and Indigenous political scientists joining discipline-based departments and programmes.

After a Coalition electoral victory in 2013, the Australian Office for Women was returned from the periphery to the centre of government. This was contrary to the expectation that women’s policy will be given greater salience under governments of the left rather than of the right. To unpack this puzzle, we examine institutional arrangements and policy directions under successive Labor and Coalition governments in Australia, including the abolition of intergovernmental bodies concerned with gender equality. We find that the influence of neoliberalism has resulted in a blurring of patterns of partisan difference over gender equality policy. There are some continuing partisan differences but also a common pattern of increased emphasis on international and regional rather than domestic policy. The notable exception to this pattern is in the area of gender-based violence.

In the past, feminist scholarship was often highly sceptical of institution-building within existing political and governance institutions. This may have contributed to a neglect of the new phenomenon of specialised parliamentary bodies with a gender equality remit. This article explores whether such parliamentary bodies can be an effective means of promoting the substantive representation of women and whether they can be understood as part of the diverse repertoire of contemporary women's movements.

For most of the twentieth century, political science was complicit in the absence of women from public office. This started to change in the 1970s as feminists began to reframe the absence of women not as a ‘condition’ but as a problem to be addressed by political science as well as political actors. This chapter examines the original assumptions found in political science concerning women’s political participation and the way these were challenged by feminist critiques. A male-dominated profession had failed to take account of how the gendered distribution of power contributed to exclusion. The chapter then looks at how feminist political scientists contributed to the promotion of new norms and strategies through transnational standard-setting institutions, as well as through engaging with laggard political institutions in the English-speaking democracies.

This chapter explores the extent of feminist institution-building within national and international political science associations and what it has achieved. We compare the initiation of gender and politics specialist groups and the strategies adopted for promoting recognition of feminist scholarship. We then use bibliometric data to show the limits to the integration of gender perspectives into core areas of the discipline. We examine factors such as the hierarchy of knowledge and its conflict with the approaches and methodological preferences of many gender scholars. We conclude that while gender and politics scholars have consolidated an epistemic community within political science and contributed to normative and policy change outside, the goal of transforming the discipline has proved difficult.

Some scholars have suggested that institutionalisation and professionalisation of women's movement organisations leads to ‘feminist fading’. This article examines whether such propositions hold true for the Australian women's movement. It maps changes in the women's movement that had emerged by the 1990s, including increased diversity and increased national and international networking as well as increased institutionalisation. It finds that loss of political influence has less to do with institutionalisation than with a changed discursive environment that constructed the welfare state and women's reliance on it as a problem. Nonetheless, women's movement institutions have continued to sustain feminist values and engage in differently organised but effective campaigns. A case study of the women's health movement in Victoria shows how it succeeded in having abortion removed from the criminal code in 2008. Repertoire had changed since the 1970s but the goal remained the same.

This article provides a first overall account of the intergovernmental components of Australia's gender equality architecture in the period 1978–2014. From the 1990s this is largely a story of institutional fragility. In explaining this, factors identified by scholars of state feminism, such as lack of political will, partisan ideologies and discursive shifts, particularly the increased influence of neoliberal approaches to governance, are taken into account. The new factor introduced is that of executive federalism, characterised by decision-making behind closed doors. When women's intergovernmental bodies attempted to open doors to community input this proved fruitless, particularly in the area of economic decision-making. Repeated attempts to introduce gender-disaggregated reporting on the outcomes of Commonwealth-State agreements were also largely unsuccessful. The article concludes that the democratic deficits associated with executive federalism – lack of parliamentary oversight or accountability and lack of community consultation – are closely related to the deficits in gender mainstreaming.

This article moves away from issues of the impact of women and feminist scholarship on political science to examine the relationship of feminist political science to a political constituency. It traces the trajectory of feminist political science from its close relationship with women's movement activism in the 1970s to the highly professionalised disciplinary subfield of today. It highlights some of the dilemmas resulting both from professional imperatives and from the norms of research excellence stemming from new forms of research governance. It finds that feminist political science has been pushed towards addressing an international community of scholars in a language inaccessible to local publics. But it finds that despite such pressures, feminist political science has still sought to produce work that is of direct relevance to achieving women's movement goals, whether within public policy or within political institutions broadly conceived. While it may no longer be speaking the same language...

In the new country of Timor-Leste, women constituted in 2011 32 per cent of the parliament, a relatively high figure in the world and in the region. But to what extent has the presence of women in parliament contributed to progress towards gender equality? In this article we argue that the passage of a parliamentary resolution on gender-responsive budgeting in Timor-Leste was an act of substantive representation, and we draw on a range of data to examine what made it possible. We find that while ‘newness’, international norms, women's movement unity, women's machinery in government and parliament and networks linking them were important, it was the development of a cross-party parliamentary women's caucus that was crucial to success. The role of gender-focused parliamentary institutions in supporting critical actors has rarely been examined in the literature on substantive representation. This is in contrast to the rich literature on institutions such as women's policy agencies. Our study suggests that more focus on parliamentary institutions is needed to discover what enables women parliamentarians to become critical actors. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was sworn into office in 2010. In 2012 she was driven to make a powerful speech on misogyny, which reverberated around the world. This researc...

Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics: Gender and Politics. Jonathan Dean, 2010. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism. Mona Le...

This article explores institutional and other factors facilitating the substantive representation of women in parliament. It engages with a range of indicators of substantive representation, including process/responsiveness indicators, legislative/policy outcomes and attitudinal alignment of women representatives and women in the community. It presents an Australian case study of a successful initiative by a cross-party group of women parliamentarians to facilitate access to the abortion drug RU486. It finds that critical mass, critical actors and a critical juncture were important but so was institution-building, particularly the under-studied role of parliamentary groups.