Postcript

Abstract

The study of elected women executives, a nonexistent political form until 1960, is in need of imaginative theorizing and empirical research. This book does just that. The preceding chapters show commonalities across countries: women leaders faced unique challenges because of their gender. Gender as a ‘master status’ often obscured other aspects of these leaders’ identity and they faced overt sexism, as well as the subtler tendency to see only the woman and not the politician. Since the late twentieth century, the number of women executives has risen as gender egalitarianism spread, women’s political involvement increased, and institutional arrangements changed with democratization. Post-transition democracies vary greatly and pose significant challenges to women leaders: women presidents and prime ministers have to maneuver the legacies of authoritarian rule and the demands of struggling democracies while breaking the association of maleness and executive power (Raicheva-Stover and Ibroscheva 2016).