How do men's and women's paths to political office differ? Once in office, are women's powers more constrained that those of men?
The number of women in executive leadership positions has grown substantially over the past five decades, and women now govern in vastly different contexts around the world. But their climbs to such positions don't necessarily correspond with social status and the existence of gender equity.
In Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact? Farida Jalalzai outlines important patterns related to women executive's paths, powers, and potential impacts. In doing so, she combines qualitative and quantitative analysis and explores both contexts in which women successfully gained executive power and those in which they did not.
The glass ceiling has truly shattered in Finland (where, to date, three different women have come to executive power), only cracked in the United Kingdom (with Margaret Thatcher as the only example of a female prime minister), and remains firmly intact in the United States. While women appear to have made substantial gains, they still face many obstacles in their pursuit of national executive office. Women, compared to their male counterparts, more often ascend to relatively weak posts and gain offices through appointment as opposed to popular election. When dominant women presidents do rise through popular vote, they still almost always hail from political families and from within unstable systems. Jalalzai asserts the importance of institutional features in contributing positive representational effects for women national leaders. Her analysis offers both a broad understanding of global dynamics of executive power as well as particulars about individual women leaders from every region of the globe over the past fifty years. Viewing gender as embedded within institutions and processes, this book provides an unprecedented and comprehensive view of the complex, contradictory, and multifaceted dimensions of women's national leadership.

Women’s security in political, economic and social terms is directly linked to the pervasive problem of violence against women. Violence Against Women: Law, Policy and Practice seeks to understand this particular form of human rights violation, by situating violence against women in its historical, political, socio-economic and legal context in South Africa.

Whether in the private or public spheres, violence against women prevents women from realising a broad range of human rights that are central to full, inclusive and participatory citizenship. The authors of this volume reflect on the many forms of violence against women, the applicable laws and policies, and the challenges to effectively responding to this widespread violation of human rights.

Their contributions consider the role of law, policy and practice in relation to a broad range of themes including sexual violence, violence against women at the margins of systems and societies, and the impact on those who are working to defeat violence against women, whether as activists, practitioners or scholars.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Angry, opinionated, mouthy, aggressive, hysterical, mad, disordered, crazy, psycho, delusional, borderline, hormonal . . . Women have long been pathologized, locked up and medicated for not conforming to whichever norms or stereotypes are expected of them in that time and space. Sexy But Psycho is a challenging and uncomfortable book which seeks to explore the way professionals and society at large pathologize and sexualise women and girls. Utilising decades of research, real case studies and new data from her own work, Dr Taylor's book will critically analyse the way we label women with personality disorders. Why are women and girls pathologized for being angry about oppression and abuse? How have so many women been duped into believing that they are mentally ill, for having normal and natural reactions to their experiences? Sexy But Psycho argues that there is a specific purpose to convincing women and girls that they are mentally ill, as the world avoids addressing violence against women and their centuries of ignored trauma.

Liveable Lives examines what makes life liveable for LGBTQ+ people beyond equality reforms. It refuses the colonizing narrative of surviving in a ‘regressive’ Global South and thriving in a ‘progressive’ Global North. By linking the concept of liveability with the decolonial literature on sexualities, this open access book draws on individual's stories, art and writing to examine how lives become liveable across India and the UK, providing a multifaceted investigation of two divergent contexts where activists refuse local framings of exclusion/inclusion and LGBTQ+ lives are continually re-envisioned. Embracing diverse methodologies, including workshops, in-depth interviews, street theatres, and web surveys, the book stands as an example of a queer collaborative praxis that refuses the familiar Global North / Global South practices of theorizing and data gathering. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

'The kind of book that has you screaming "Yes! Yes! Yes! Now I get it!" on almost every page' Caitlin Moran 'Dr Taylor sets out a compelling case . . . gives voice and agency to women who have experienced trauma and violence' Morning Star She asked for it. She was flirting. She was drinking. She was wearing a revealing dress. She was too confident. She walked home alone. She stayed in that relationship. She was naive. She didn't report soon enough. She didn't fight back. She wanted it. She lied about it. She comes from a bad area. She was vulnerable. She should have known. She should have seen it coming. She should have protected herself. The victim blaming of women is prevalent and normalised in society both in the UK, and around the world. What is it that causes us to blame women who have been abused, raped, trafficked, assaulted or harassed by men? Why are we uncomfortable with placing all of the blame on the perpetrators for their crimes against women and girls? Based on three years of doctoral research and ten years of practice with women and girls, Dr Jessica Taylor explores the many reasons we blame women for male violence committed against them. Written in her unique style and backed up by decades of evidence, this book exposes the powerful forces in society and individual psychology which compel us to blame women subjected to male violence.

The figure of the mistress is undoubtedly controversial. She provokes intense reactions, ranging from fear, to disgust and revulsion, to excitement and titillation, to sadness and perhaps to some, love. The mistress is conventionally depicted as a threat to moral living and someone whose sexuality is considered defective and toxic. Of course, she is a woman that you would not have as your friend, and certainly not your wife, since her ethical sense, if she even has one, is dubious at best. This book subverts these traditional judgements and offers an unflinching look at the lived experience of the mistress. Here she is recast as a potentially loving, free, intimate 'other' woman. Drawing upon feminist philosophy, contemporary sexual ethics and the current cultural moment of #MeToo, Mistress Ethics moves beyond a narrative of infidelity, conventional judgment, the safeguarding of monogamy and conventional heterosex that permeates our society. It asks what happens when we let go of our insecurities, judgments and moralistic relationship philosophies and opt, instead, for an ethics of kindness. This kindness - underpinned by engaging with those deemed 'other' and learning from mistresses, both straight and queer - will teach us new ways of thinking about ethics and sex, and reveal how we have better sex, and how we can be better to each other.

Reveals how gender intersects with race, class, and sexual orientation in ways that impact the legal status and well-being of women and girls in the justice system. Women and girls' contact with the justice system is often influenced by gender-related assumptions and stereotypes. The justice practices of the past 40 years have been largely based on conceptual principles and assumptions-including personal theories about gender-more than scientific evidence about what works to address the specific needs of women and girls in the justice system. Because of this, women and girls have limited access to equitable justice and are increasingly caught up in outdated and harmful practices, including the net of the criminal justice system. Gender, Psychology, and Justice uses psychological research to examine the experiences of women and girls involved in the justice system. Their experiences, from initial contact with justice and court officials, demonstrate how gender intersects with race, class, and sexual orientation to impact legal status and well-being. The volume also explains the role psychology can play in shaping legal policy, ranging from the areas of corrections to family court and drug court. Gender, Psychology, and Justice provides a critical analysis of girls' and women's experiences in the justice system. It reveals the practical implications of training and interventions grounded in psychological research, and suggests new principles for working with women and girls in legal settings.

This Open Access book aims to find out how and why states in various regions and of diverse cultural backgrounds fail in their gender equality laws and policies. In doing this, the book maps out states' failures in their legal systems and unpacks the clashes between different levels and forms of law-namely domestic laws, local regulations, or the implementation of international law, individually or in combination. By taking off from the confirmation that the concept of law that is to be used in achieving gender equality is a multidimensional, multi-layered, and to an extent, contradictory phenomenon, this book aims to find out how different layers of laws interact and how they impact gender equality. Further to that, by including different states and jurisdictions into its analysis, this book unravels whether there are any similarities/patterns in how these states define and utilise policies and laws that harm gender equality. In this way, the book contributes to the efforts to devise holistic and universal policies to address various forms of gender inequalities across the world. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sociology, Law, and Criminology.

Equality is often trampled on by those who believe they are, in varying ways, superior. However, identifying how government systems can protect against discrimination can assist future generations in combating the harsh realities of inequality. Social Jurisprudence in the Changing of Social Norms: Emerging Research and Opportunities delivers a collection of resources dedicated to identifying sexual orientation as a protected legal class like race, color, gender, and religion using innovative research methods and the federalist responses to the LGBT movement. While highlighting topics including judicial review, LGBT politics, and social change framework, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, politicians, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the analysis of legal cases that provide evidence of LGBT citizen marginalization.

The common law action for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth century that it rose to prominence and became a regular feature in law courts and gossip columns. By 1940 the action was defunct, it was inconceivable for a respectable woman to bring such a case before the courts. What accounts for this dramatic rise and fall? This book ties the story of the action's prominence and decline between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family. It argues that the idiosyncratic breach-of-promise suit and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were inextricably, and fatally, entwined. It presents the nineteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a codification of the Victorian ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods - the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian and the post-Victorian periods - and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse, to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.

This book is an account of the concept of equality from the perspective of both theory and practice, and presents methods of quantifying values. It considers both arguments and evidence, and tackles equality in its different forms, including economic equality, education, equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and gender equality. The book shows that inequality is a profoundly moral question, noting that there are good practical reasons for its adoption. It presents a consideration of classical theories from Aristotle to Hume, as well as contemporary approaches such as those offered by Rawls, Haidt, Temkin, and Parfit. It also contemplates issues such as the naturalistic fallacy, and considers what is different about the Goleman view of moral sensitivity and the ethical personality. The array of evidence includes the impact of climate and various plants such as sugar and cotton on the slave trade, the concept of Gaia, Darwinism, sex inequality, personality, culture, psychological issues, and the quantification of ethics. The book concludes with some practical suggestions for improving equality. It aims to raise awareness of the ways in which equality can be understood, and achieved. It will be relevant to students and scholars in philosophy, human rights, and law.

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the United States, the Middle East, and North Africa, to discuss and critically analyze the intersection of gender and human rights laws as applied to individuals of Arab descent. It seeks to raise consciousness at the intersection of gender, identity, and human rights as it relates to Arabs at home and throughout the diaspora. The context of revolution and the destabilizing impact of armed conflicts in the region are used to critique and examine the utility of human rights law to address contemporary human rights issues through extralegal strategies. To this end, the volume seeks to inform, educate, persuade, and facilitate newer or less-heard perspectives related to gender and masculinities theories. It provides readers with new ways of understanding gender and human rights and proposes forward-looking solutions to implementing human rights norms. The goal of this book is to use the context of Arabs at home and throughout the diaspora to critique and examine the utility of human rights norms and laws to diminish human suffering with the goal of transforming the structural, social, and cultural conditions that impede access to human rights. This book will be of interest to a diverse audience of scholars, students, public policy researchers, lawyers and the educated public interested in the fields of human rights law, international studies, gender politics, migration and diaspora, and Middle East and North African politics.

Tort law is the body of law governing negligence, intentional misconduct, and other wrongful acts for which civil actions can be brought. The conventional wisdom is that the rules, concepts, and structures of tort law are neutral and unbiased, free of considerations of gender and race.

In The Measure of Injury, Martha Chamallas and Jennifer Wriggins prove that tort law is anything but gender and race neutral. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of case law ranging from the Jim Crow South to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the authors demonstrate that women and minorities have been under-compensated in tort law and that traditional biases have resurfaced in updated forms to perpetuate patterns of disparate recovery based on race and gender. Grappling with tort theory, the intricacies of legal doctrine and the practical effects of legal rules, The Measure of Injury is a unique treatise on torts that uncovers the public and cultural dimensions of this always-controversial domain of private law.

The fact that domestic violence is a serious and ongoing social problem has been well recognized since the women's movement made the hitherto private experience of violence against women in the home into a political issue in the 1960s and 1970s. In Australia, a major national prevalence study of violence against women conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1996 found that 23% of women who had ever been married or in a de facto relationship-1.1 million women-had experienced violence from their partner at some stage during the relationship. Feminist legal scholarship, however, has highlighted the many failures of criminal law to respond adequately to women's experiences of domestic violence. Civil remedies for violence and abuse seem to offer better possibilities: there is a lower standard of proof, and the woman is the subject of her own action rather than merely being the object of proceedings. The availability of civil remedies has, in many cases, resulted from feminist campaigns to fill the gaps in protection left by the criminal law. It has also been argued that civil actions provide scope to change public discourses and legal understandings of violence against women. Listening to women's stories might force a revision of traditional conceptions and myths about what constitutes violence, its causes and effects, and "appropriate" reactions to it. This study investigates the ways in which women's experiences of domestic violence are heard and understood in civil court settings, and examines women's experiences of telling their stories (or at least attempting to do so) in those settings. The two areas on which the study focuses are intervention order proceedings in State Magistrates' Courts, and residence, contact, and property matters in the federal Family Court in Australia. The relevant legislation in the two jurisdictions is either partly or wholly a product of feminist legal activism. The study, therefore, seeks to determine whether the feminist claim that the criminal law silences women also pertains in the context of new civil claims specifically designed to respond to women's experiences. The general history and theory of law reform suggests that reforms often strike problems in the process of implementation. But because law does not operate monolithically, the exact nature of those problems is not necessarily predictable. In the context of this study, implementation problems may arise from social and legal discourses about domestic violence and about victims of violence which tend to operate constantly across the legal system, and/or they may arise from the particular rules and structures found in each institutional setting. There is thus a need for detailed examination and analysis of how these various elements operate and interact in different court settings. In undertaking this task, the study has two objectives. First, it draws conclusions about the nature of implementation problems in the two jurisdictions in order to inform future feminist activism around violence against women. Secondly, it makes a more general point about the importance of procedure in feminist legal theory and praxis. In Australia in particular, feminist legal scholars and advocates have placed a heavy emphasis on doctrinal revision and have largely ignored issues of implementation. The study argues that procedure (conceived broadly to encompass the what, where, how, and who of legal proceedings) crucially shapes women's experience of the legal process, and is neglected by feminists at their peril. This book will be of interest to feminist jurisprudence and law and society scholars and researchers, and to activists and advocates in the field of domestic violence.

Title IX, a landmark federal statute enacted in 1972 to prohibit sex discrimination in education, has worked its way into American culture as few other laws have. It is an iconic law, the subject of web blogs and T-shirt slogans, and is widely credited with opening the doors to the massive numbers of girls and women now participating in competitive sports. Yet few people fully understand the law's requirements, or the extent to which it has succeeded in challenging the gender norms that have circumscribed women's opportunities as athletes and their place in society more generally.

In this first legal analysis of Title IX, Deborah L. Brake assesses the statute's successes and failures. While the statute has created tremendous gains for female athletes, not only raising the visibility and cultural acceptance of women in sports, but also creating social bonds for women, positive body images, and leadership roles, the disparities in funding between men's and women's sports have remained remarkably resilient. At the same time, female athletes continue to receive less prestige and support than their male counterparts, which in turn filters into the arena of professional sports. Brake provides a richer understanding and appreciation of what Title IX has accomplished, while taking a critical look at the places where the law has fallen short. A unique contribution to the literature on Title IX, Getting in the Game fully explores the theory, policy choices, successes, and limitations of this historic law.

"Feminist Legal Theory" is just over a decade old in the United States and is even younger in most other countries. Here, Francis Olsen presents the best articles from within this burgeoning field. Drawing on literature which is extremely rich and varied, these volumes include articles from a range leading legal scholars and feminists. Two volumes.

Half a century after the beginning of the second wave, feminist legal theorists are still writing about many of the subjects they addressed early on: money, sex, reproduction, and jobs. What has changed is the way that they talk about these subjects. Specifically, these theorists now posit a more complex and nuanced conception of power. Recent scholarship recognizes the complexities of power in contemporary society, the ways in which these complexities entrench sex inequality, and the role that law can play in reducing inequality and increasing agency. The feminist legal theorists in this volume are emblematic of this effort. They carefully examine the relationship between gender, equality, and power across an array of realms: sex, reproduction, pleasure, work, money. In doing so they identify social, political, economic, developmental, and psychological and somatic forces, operating both internally and externally, that complicate the expression and constraint of power. Finally, they give sophisticated thought to the possibilities for legal interventions in light of these more complex notions of power.

The question of 'recognition' motivates a range of contemporary social movements and forms the backdrop to legal and policy change, and theoretical and political debate. This timely book draws on original research to examine the meanings and significance of, and contestations around, recognition in relation to the aptly named UK 'Gender Recognition Act'. Gender Diversity, Recognition and Citizenship: Towards a Politics of Difference considers changing UK law and policy around gender diversity within the context of broader social, cultural, legal, political, theoretical, and policy shifts concerning gender and sexuality. In bringing together a wide range of critical interdisciplinary perspectives, and by addressing key debates about inclusion, equality, diversity, human rights and citizenship, the book examines gaps between law and policy, and everyday experiences and understandings of social justice. Through a critical engagement with a politics of recognition, Gender Diversity, Recognition and Citizenship instates the value of a 'politics of difference'.

"Little did I know that my intimidation by senior officers in the UNDP had only just begun." Fouzia Saeed dreamed of bringing social change to the women of Pakistan and was thrilled to land her dream job at the world's ethical compass and institutional tour de force: The United Nations. As expected, the UN was a gathering place for passionate minds devoted to human rights and justice for all. Shockingly, at the UN mission in Pakistan it was also a breeding ground for powerful men who viewed women as sexual objects rather than professional equals. Refusing her boss's advances didn't stop the harassment. Reporting him to superiors didn't either. In her years-long struggle with torment and humiliation at the UN, Fouzia held strong, knowing her fight for women's rights was the only thing that could keep her going. But how do you fight for others' rights when you cannot even take hold of your own? Can you ever change a culture that views sexual harassment by a man as a woman's crime? Fouzia and a group of female colleagues, who similarly suffered in the workplace, gained the courage to risk their reputations. They filed a joint compliant and promptly found themselves under attack by their managers who aligned with the perpetrator in an effort to crush their case. Working with Sharks follows eleven indestructible women and the case that sparked a national movement and culminated in the passage of legislation that made sexual harassment a crime in Pakistan in 2010. Inspirational and poignant, Working with Sharks encourages women in any part of the world to find their voice and stand up to sexual harassment.

An exploration of the ways that multiple inequalities are being addressed in Europe. Using country-based and region-specific case studies it provides an innovative comparative analysis of the multidimensional equality regimes that are emerging in Europe, and reveals the potential that these have for institutionalizing intersectionality.

Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary works and should work? Or is gender-blindness a built-in prerequisite of judicial objectivity? If gender does make a difference, how might this be defined? These are the key questions posed in this collection of essays, by some 30 authors from the following countries; Argentina, Cambodia, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Syria and the United States. The contributions draw on various theoretical approaches, including gender, feminist and sociological theories. The book's pressing topicality is underlined by the fact that well into the modern era male opposition to women's admission to, and progress within, the judicial profession has been largely based on the argument that their very gender programmes women to show empathy, partiality and gendered prejudice - in short essential qualities running directly counter to the need for judicial objectivity. It took until the last century for women to begin to break down such seemingly insurmountable barriers. And even now, there are a number of countries where even this first step is still waiting to happen. In all of them, there remains a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women's judicial careers.