Editorial | Open Access
Gender Equality Reforms in Parliaments
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Abstract: Gender equality reforms implemented across various parliaments around the world have diversified. Introducing the thematic issue Gender Equality Reforms in Parliaments, we trace the context of making parliamentary institutions more gender-sensitive. We highlight both international organizations’ top-down efforts and grassroots movements’ bottom-up approaches and emphasize the complexities of descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. We argue that next to the broader setting, feminist institutionalism provided a critical lens to examine these relationships while acknowledging the need for gender-sensitive parliaments that prioritize gender equality. We illuminate contributions from both the Global South and North and pay particular attention to “extraordinary cases” as well as methodological, theoretical, and conceptual innovations, highlighting the challenges and opportunities in institutionalizing gender equality in diverse political contexts.
Keywords: critical actors; gender equality; gender‐sensitive parliaments; governments; parliaments; policy reform; political parties; political representation; procedural reform
Published:
© Petra Ahrens, Sonia Palmieri. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.