How the Absence of Women Became a Democratic Deficit: The Role of Feminist Political Science

Abstract

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.