Women's policy machineries and representation in the USA: toward filling empirical gaps.

The US federal bureaucracy contains 7 women's policy machineries: The White House Gender Policy Council, the Center for Women Veterans, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, the Office of Global Women's Issues at the Department of State, the Office on Women's Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office on Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice, and the Women's Bureau at the Department of Labor. Together these offices provide a broad, shared commitment to advancing women's interests, but they vary greatly in terms of their missions, activities, constituencies served, organizational structure, forms of authorization, and levels of collaboration with political actors inside and outside of government. Recognizing the variation in American women's policy machineries, this paper provides a proposed empirical framework for how scholars can begin to document the variation in American WPMs and analyze how effectively each WPM implements gender equality policies and empowers American women. The first section defines WPMs. The second section proposes the research question, data sources, and methods for a future study of American WPMs. The conclusion discusses the implications adding this proposed study to the broader comparative literature on WPMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]