Scholars of women and politics have been trying to determine what difference gender makes in the political system since the number of women leaders has grown substantially over the past several decades. A set of five recent books illuminates a variety of questions that help us consider the relation of gender to electoral politics—from the development of political ambition to holding elective office at the highest levels. Research in gender and politics shows that while the gap between men and women has been narrowing over time, there are still substantive differences in women's and men's levels and opportunities for political engagement, whether locally, nationally, or globally. Taken together, these five books offer insights into the challenges women leaders have overcome and the obstacles they continue to face. Women are getting elected and are viewed as effective leaders. However, perceptions of who is qualified to be a candidate, as well as gatekeeping within parties have kept women from being elected at rates comparable to men worldwide. The beauty of reading these five books is that they present a comprehensive behavioral, institutional, and cultural analysis of the progress women have made in elected office. Not only do these books use robust quantitative and qualitative methods to support conclusions, but they also provide comparative analysis if read together.

The first three books reviewed here use data from the United States to return to questions about the success of women candidates over time. In Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for Office, Jennifer Lawless argues that we still need to focus on nascent ambition, perception of qualifications, and recruitment in order to encourage more women to run for office. Susan Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu show in More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State Legislatures, that women are indeed getting elected, although not necessarily from the professional backgrounds that have typically led to political office for men. In He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates, Deborah Jordan Brooks argues that people are ready to treat women as “leaders, not ladies,” particularly once they are in office. As a whole, these books help us understand what hinders women in the American political context, yet they offer a hopeful picture for women's electoral prospects: evidence presented by Frank C. Thames and Margaret S. Williams in Contagious Representation: Women's Political Representation in Democracies around the World suggests a contagion among systems will lead to the election of more women worldwide; and evidence presented by Farida Jalalzai in Shattered, Cracked or Firmly Intact? Women and the Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide, pinpoints the final political position that needs “cracking.”

In Becoming a Candidate, Lawless argues that “political ambition is a far more volatile commodity than prior research acknowledges, and that the initial decision to run for office is driven systematically by far more than a political opportunity structure” (23). Lawless examines four factors that shape the development of political ambition in candidates: minority status; family dynamics, both in terms of early political socialization and the balancing act of having a family and career; professional experiences and perception of qualifications; and, finally, political attitudes and recruitment (20–22). Lawless constructs an additive empirical model that predicts candidate emergence, drawing on the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study that she and Richard Fox compiled in 2001 and 2008, initially mailing surveys to 6,800 citizens who occupy “the four professions and backgrounds that tend to yield the highest proportion of political candidates: law, business, education and political activism” (25). Lawless uses the data to examine the issue of nascent ambition, shifting the question of who decides to run for office and why to a time horizon long before a decision has been made.

Lawless examines differences in ambition by gender and race. Her analysis reveals that “[w]omen and men in the candidate eligibility pool may be similarly situated … [b]ut women of all races exhibit significantly lower levels of interest in entering electoral politics than do their male counterparts” (75). In part, this may be attributable to the perception that it is harder for women to win races (72), whether or not that is the case. Race alone, however, is not attributable to differences in ambition, as black potential candidates are more likely than white and Latino respondents to have considered running for office. In order to account for these differences, Lawless examines the role of the family in candidate emergence, finding that “indicators of a politicized upbringing … exert three times the effect of sex on considering a candidacy; growing up in a politicized home, therefore, can more than compensate for the disadvantage women face in developing nascent ambition” (84). Beyond socialization, a family situation can inspire a run for office for some individuals, while for others the balancing act of work and family makes it a difficult proposition. Family responsibilities can influence both men and women not to make a run for office. However, qualitative evidence from interviews with 150 women and 150 men showed that while 82 of the women “stated that children made seeking office a more difficult endeavor for women,” only seven of the men did so (94). Support, or lack thereof, from within a family can alleviate or reinforce concerns about running for office (99).

Chapters 6 through 8 take up the question of candidate qualifications and the decision to run for office. Lawless finds that women are more likely to underestimate their qualifications, contributing to the gender gap in candidacy. Black respondents have higher self-efficacy assessments, yet “are significantly less likely to consider running for office” (128). It is unclear whether black women are subject to diminished assessment of their qualifications or not. There is, however, a significant gap in the recruitment of women compared to men in both 2001 and 2008, particularly for Republican women (146–48). The final element that can affect recruitment is the overall perception of the political process. As cynicism in the candidate pool increases, the desire to run for office decreases.

While Lawless’ data drew on the four most common professions of elected officials, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu show that women getting elected to office are often coming to electoral politics from professions that deviate from the traditional norm. In More Women Can Run, they find that although women's multiple pathways to elected office are often different from men's, women are nonetheless running for office and getting elected. Women's underrepresentation is still a problem. However, they offer a hopeful analysis, concluding that women who would like to run for office and win need not seek to replicate men's paths to politics. Ultimately, more women should run because more women are electable.

Carroll and Sanbonmatsu use data from surveys of state legislators conducted in 1981 and in 2008, as well as follow-up interviews, to assess strategies for bringing more women into office. They reexamine factors understood to account for women's underrepresentation and find within each of them an underlying assumption that there is one best path to political office. Their data, however, show that women state legislators are forging many different pathways to office. Women have not followed their advances in the fields of law and business with greater political representation, as expected. Instead, they have been elected from fields such as education and health care that have been female-dominated. The persistent differences in the area of women state legislators’ occupation, construed under the traditional model as a deviation from the norm, may actually be a key strength from which to grow the notion of who could be a candidate for office and what qualifications best befit them. Women already seem to come to office with greater political experience than their male counterparts, according to data from both 1981 and 2008. However, they experience a confidence gap, part of which may be why women are not getting to office in the “right” way.

While family issues were important for both men and women candidates, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu found that women were more often affected by the gender division of labor in the home (28). While these responsibilities may weigh against a run for office, traditional models of self-activated ambition fail to account for the “relationally-embedded decision” that more often applies to women than men who do decide to run for office (42). Family groups, community networks, organizations, and elected officials can help women see themselves as candidates. Political parties are also a part of this community. However, recent stagnation in the numbers of women candidates is largely the result of diminished numbers of Republican women being elected. The authors note that “[w]omen did not become less Republican …; rather, men became more Republican” (70). Ideological shift in the Republican Party has had a profound effect on women's candidacies, and conservative selection bias has exercised a disproportionate effect on women (83).

By contrast, Democratic women are far outpacing Republican women, despite their lack of parity with Democratic men. The election of Democratic women of color has fueled these advances, but the tendency to elect Democratic women of color from majority-minority districts threatens the continuation of this upward trend (93–94). However, those minority women are more likely than their white counterparts to have faced a primary challenge, or to have had divided party support (104). Despite this, party support is an important factor in running for office for more Democratic women than men (113). When asked about their perceptions of statewide candidates’ fundraising, “more than four times as many Democratic women as men … agreed that ‘[i]t is harder for female candidates to raise money than male candidates’” (115). More research is needed to determine whether this gap discourages women from running for office and to determine what fundraising differences continue to exist.

Carroll and Sanbonmatsu remind us in their final chapter that women do not need to be more like men in order to get elected to office. Women more often than men need to be recruited, and they need to be given resources to successfully compete. For Democratic women, those resources have often come from women's organizations (126). However, parties (and other groups) may offer greater support once they realize that taking a different path is not a deviation, but rather a new norm that women have established through their electoral successes.

Deborah Jordan Brooks also shows that women are now more successful as candidates. She approaches the issue of women's national electoral opportunities by asking “whether gender stereotypes and double standards do, in fact, hold back female candidates on the campaign trail” (4). In He Runs, She Runs, Brooks argues that “the general public simply no longer views women legislators as being less capable than men on traits central to leadership and does not penalize women for acting in a tough and ‘unfeminine’ manner” (4–5). Brooks draws on data collected in 2009 to contest the conventional wisdom that there are tougher standards of qualification and double standards in behavior for women candidates. Instead, she argues that, “female candidates will be judged on the basis of good leadership rather than on the basis of good femininity, and thus do not face higher standards” (12).

The second and third chapters of Brooks’ book describe the double standards theory she's contesting and her method of gathering data. Brooks predicts “that most people in the current era will evaluate legislative candidates on the basis of matters other than gender” (38). In order to test this, she used a set of six Goldberg paradigm experiments, administering online surveys to 3,000 U.S. adults. In paired narratives, names and gender pronouns were altered, but a fictional story, which incorporated certain behaviors, concerning the candidate was held constant. Each survey respondent was given one article to read about either “Karen Bailey” or “Kevin Bailey” and then was asked a series of questions about the candidate. Brooks summarizes her research overall, arguing that “[t]he bottom line of most of my findings is that the public does not have different standards for female candidates than it does for their male counterparts” (58). In chapters 4 through 8, Brooks finds each time that the public judge her hypothetical man and woman similarly, if not the same, on a variety of measures, such as experience, emotion, lack of empathy, and lack of knowledge.

Ultimately, Brooks argues, “Too many different situations were tested in this study with no indication of gender bias and double standards to think that Americans as a whole are unsupportive of women leaders” (146). Brooks hopes that her findings will persuade more women to run “by correcting a prevalent misperception that women face disproportionate challenges vis-à-vis public opinion” (147). For her, the conventional wisdom that women's electoral campaigns are harder to win because of stereotypes held by the public is a falsehood, “a common misperception that is disseminated by many political elites” (162). Brooks argues that the public has learned to treat women candidates, in her terms, as “leaders not ladies.”Footnote ¹ Once political elites do this as well, candidate emergence may become the next terrain upon which women find parity.

Taken together, the books by Lawless, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu, and Brooks show that American women are running for office and winning, and their constituents see them as strong leaders. All three books provide updates on how women are more likely to run and win. However, work needs to be done in developing women's nascent ambition and challenging women's diminished perceptions of their qualifications for office. Likewise, parties’ leaders must be led to see women's full potential as candidates in order to balance women's representation in the American system.

Where the first three volumes reviewed here analyze the transformation of women's pathways to elected office over the past several decades in the United States, the last two volumes focus their analysis on women as elected political leaders on the contemporary global stage. They help us consider two more important questions: (1) Does it matter if women are running and winning more often? (2) Can we draw conclusions from the American example? Contagious Representation: Women's Political Representation in Democracies around the World by Franck Thames and Margaret Williams and Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact? Women and the Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide by Farida Jalalzai extend the analysis of women's political engagement to an evaluation of their successes obtaining and maintaining political power around the globe. Despite current evidence that multiple pathways to power exist for women candidates, women are more electable, and the public does not view women as less capable of leadership, structural barriers continue to limit women's descriptive and substantive representation in political institutions at the local, national, and global levels. The extensive data presented in these next two volumes suggest that women, in particular, continue to face significant hurdles in breaking the executive and judicial glass ceiling around the world.

Both books use large-number (N) comparative databases, time series analysis spanning multiple decades, cross-sectional data including Africa, Latin America, and consider legislative, executive, judicial, and party institutions. They also nicely juxtapose quantitative and qualitative analysis to make their arguments. Thames and Williams, for example, use country case studies of France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States, while Jalalzai employs both country case studies and case studies of women executives and candidates for executive office like Margaret Thatcher (UK), Ségolène Royal (France), and Hillary Clinton (U.S.). In addition to country and institutional level analysis, neither book sets aside the important correlation between expanding labor force participation and cultural support for women as they evaluate their growing strength inside political institutions.

In Contagious Representation, Thames and Williams argue that the inclusion of women in one political institution leads to an extension of their numbers and strength in other political institutions. They theorize that the election of more women legislators will increase the chance of a contagion effect that opens doors for women elected officials in other branches of government and as political party leaders. The authors note that much of the literature on women political leaders is limited to studies of single institutions, single countries, or single regions, and they “seek to understand whether women's legislative representation in any way explains increases in women's representations in other areas” (3). In chapters 2 and 3, their analysis of 159 countries spanning 61 years (1945–2006) shows that the increase of women legislators enhances the chance that a country will select a female president or prime minister. However, they also discover that the presence of a female executive does not conversely effect an increase in women's legislative representation. Chapter 4 shows that “part of the variation in the level of women's representation in other democratic institutions explains the variation in women's high court representation” (61). As an example, Thames and Williams demonstrate that Japan lags behind the rest of the world in women's judiciary participation in part because they are well below average in women's legislative representation (73). These findings suggest a limited contagion effect depending on region because evidence of the relationship is most apparent in the 34 countries that are members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Finally, in chapters 5 and 6 the authors demonstrate with data and further case studies of Sweden and Ireland that voluntary party quotas are contagious across all parties within a system and are directly related to the adoption of national party quotas. However, there is no evidence that an increase in legislative or executive seats for women increases the adoption of national party quotas.

Thames and Williams’ accessible, rigorous, and complex analysis reminds us that factors other than ambition, cultural support, and increased participation of women in the labor force should be considered when attempting to explain the growth and complexity of women's political leadership worldwide. Still, the institutional contagion argument has limited explanatory power, despite the appeal and promise of the thesis. The authors find evidence of contagion in established democracies but still find significant variation across region and in transitioning democracies. As the numbers of women leaders grow at all levels of government and across regions, this kind of comprehensive and ambitious global institutional analysis will be of more value, and the results will be more generalizable. Until then, there is still value in the single institutional explorations of women's leadership.

By narrowing the analysis to the executive branch but still maintaining a global approach, Jalalzai is able to make a more convincing case about the current status of women candidates and political leaders. She argues that women candidates and political leaders may have had success around the globe as candidates and legislators but that “men continue to dominate as presidents and prime ministers, and this will undoubtedly persist for the foreseeable future” (9). Even when women are elected to serve as executives, Jalalzai argues that “they often occupy weaker posts than men in systems with less concentrated authority” (54). In another large-N comparative analysis, Jalalzai goes beyond the typical single case study or regional analysis to explore a dataset of 80 women elected executives and 252 women candidates for executive office between 1960 and 2010. Similar to Thames and Williams, in her exploration of executive office, Jalalzai looks at a variety of factors. She specifically considers region, time, political system, gender, a country's international position, relevant country context, and the personal success and professional characteristics of the women elected or seeking executive office. Like Thames and Williams, the analysis uses both comprehensive quantitative data and rich qualitative data including candidate case studies.

Unlike the other books reviewed here, Jalalzai questions the assumption that women have made vast progress over the past several decades—at least in the executive branch. She notes the great strides women have made toward executive leadership but also points out that there have been only 79 women executives around the world in more than five decades: “the glass ceiling indeed appears shattered in some contexts, such as Finland, only cracked in the United Kingdom, and firmly intact in the United States” (40). In chapters 2 and 3, the book includes a thorough literature review of women in executive office and a review of various selection procedures for executives in different political systems. One of the more interesting features of the book is Jalalzai's typology of executive positions based on constitutional design and governance power in practice. The results of her analyses demonstrate that “women rarely rule the more visible and globally critical countries,” despite the unique example of Germany's Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton's candidacy in the United States (55). Women are more likely to serve as a dual-executive, a prime minister, and to be selected by the legislature than to serve in a unified presidential system and/or to be elected by popular vote.

Chapters 4 through 6 provide a nice complement to the Lawless, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu, and Brooks titles about women and elections. Where the books reviewed previously indicate the challenges women candidates both face and have overcome in the U.S. system, Jalalzai shows that a cross-regional analysis uncovers remaining challenges to women's pathway to power. Here she reviews the variation that exists in women's executive candidacies and executive power by presenting data and several candidate case studies. The review of women's leadership style, ambition, political experience, family ties to office, and unique electoral circumstances discussed in these three chapters outlines the idiosyncrasies that explain many successes of female executives. They also emphasize the substantive differences in male and female leadership styles and pathways to office. Women are more likely to have held more feminine leadership posts as opposed to more masculine posts in military or security; they are more likely to have family ties to executive office; and the most powerful women have come to office via unique circumstances. In its final chapters, the book presents comparative case studies of Hillary Clinton (U.S.) and Ségolène Royal (France). These two case studies highlight why women in some of the most influential countries in of the world are not successful despite the strength of their candidacies. In summary, Jalalzai argues that women are more likely to hold office in places where executives have dispersed institutional power, if they hold power at all.

Read together, these five books show that women are indeed more electable and that their numbers have increased significantly over the last several decades. Women can be found more frequently running for office and serving as legislators, party leaders, and judges. Further, evidence presented in these volumes suggests that women approach their candidacies and leadership posts differently than do men, but they are still more frequently perceived as electable and capable today than in the past. This rosy picture is tempered by the two large-scale comparative analyses of women candidates and officeholders. Both the Thames and Williams and the Jalalzai books indicate that women are now more likely to advance worldwide in nonexecutive posts, but only in established democracies, and that success varies by region. In her last chapter, Jalalzai suggests that the future for women leaders is not quite as bright as we would hope, arguing that “women's success is questionable since the strongest and most visible executive positions continue to constitute a male reserve” (78). Institutions, executive selection processes and structures, and women's cultural status are all intricately tied to gender. As a whole, these five books would stimulate discussion and future research in any upper-division undergraduate- or graduate-level course. Overall, they provide exceptional examples of well written, methodologically sound, and thought-provoking research on women in politics and should be part of any scholar's research collection.