Introduction

Since Political Science last published a special issue on Women and Politics in 1993, there have been demonstrable advances in women’s political and economic status in many Western democracies, including New Zealand. Progress towards full equality, however, appears in many cases to be halting or even stalled, suggesting that significant barriers remain to women’s advancement. Persistent gender inequality even in the face of improvement of women's position, and strategies to reinvigorate the gender equality agenda, are thus central themes of this special issue on Women and Politics. Demonstrating the embedded nature of gender inequality and the continuing debate about gender differences in political behaviour and attitudes, a number of the articles in this issue cover issues that were also a focus of the 1993 special issue.

Feminism – in all its forms – remains at the heart of attempts to understand and counter gender inequality. It is also subject to constant resistance, resurgence and reformulation. In the first article of the 1993 special issue, Heather Devere and Jennifer Curtin’s study on the ‘plurality of feminism’ concluded that considering resistance to the term ‘feminism’, and the multiple interpretations of feminism given by New Zealand interviewees in their analysis, ‘a viable inclusive [feminist] identity politics may not be possible’. In the early twenty-first century, feminism continues to face challenges as a collective and inclusive social movement. Indeed, the first article in this special issue, Julia’s Schuster’s study ‘Invisible feminists? Social media and young women’s political participation’, finds that young women’s use of social media for feminist discussion and activism has led to a communicative divide between ‘second-wave’ and ‘third-wave’ feminists in New Zealand, with the latter sometimes bemoaning what they see as an absence of feminist awareness and activism among younger generations. The younger feminists interviewed by Schuster, for their part, expressed resentment that older feminists did not seem to notice or acknowledge the online activism of their younger peers. This inter-generational divide was compounded by divisions between the various manifestations of ‘third-wave’ feminism. Schuster also found, however, that online engagement with feminist blogs, Facebook pages and other social media sites allowed feminists who might otherwise be isolated to make connections across spatial and national divides. Schuster concludes that although the exclusive nature of online activism seems currently to be working against third-wave feminism’s goal of inclusivity, there is ‘reason to be optimistic that differences and problems caused by the use of social media will decrease in the future’.

In the second article in this special issue, Hilde Coffé looks at gender differences in party choice at the most recent general election of 2011. Using data from the New Zealand Election Study, she concludes that gender differences were relatively minor. The only appreciable gender difference relates to support for New Zealand First, with men being substantially more supportive of the populist right-wing party than women. The lack of a major gender gap in voting for the main left- and right-wing parties contradicts research in other post-industrial societies where women have been found to have moved towards the left since the 1980s, with women being more likely to support left-wing parties than men as a result. Coffé’s findings, however, are in line with those presented by Jack Vowles in the 1993 special issue on Women and Politics, in which he found no significant gender difference in voting Labour or National in the 1983 and 1990 New Zealand elections (see also Levine and Roberts in the same issue). Hence, New Zealand does not seem to follow the pattern of the so-called modern gender gap which is prevalent in many post-industrial societies. This is not to say that there are no gender differences in opinion: Coffé shows how women are significantly more supportive than men of government taking responsibility for providing employment and protecting living standards for the elderly and unemployed. This tendency for women’s attitudes to lean towards the left was also suggested by Vowles in 1993. Coffé also, however, finds women to be less supportive of the presence and arrival of (more) immigrants in New Zealand than men. Interestingly, her multivariate analyses reveal that if women and men were to hold similar attitudes on issues related migration and the government’s responsibility towards citizens’ welfare, women would be more likely to support National than men: an effect, she found, that cannot be explained by a greater preference for National’s leader John Key among women than men.

Our third article moves the focus beyond New Zealand and addresses questions about women’s equality within legislative politics internationally. In their study ‘Gender quotas, gender mainstreaming and gender relations in politics’, Petra Meier and Emanuela Lombardo note the complex and multifaceted causes of women’s under-representation, drawing attention to both cultural and structural elements of patriarchy. Similarly, in her 1993 article on the representation of women in the New Zealand parliament, Elizabeth McLeay identified both ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ obstacles to women gaining seats in parliament. Writing prior to the introduction of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system in 1996, McLeay argued that New Zealand’s first-past-the-post electoral system was an important ‘demand’ factor holding back the representation of women in parliament. Only 15 out of 97 New Zealand MPs (15.4 per cent) were women at that time. Six elections later women’s representation has increased, with female MPs now making up 32.2 per cent of women in the New Zealand parliament. MMP has clearly removed some structural barriers to women’s parliamentary representation in New Zealand, but the proportion of women in the New Zealand parliament has remained stuck at around 33 per cent over the past three elections. This ‘ceiling’ is evident in other arenas of public life, both in New Zealand and abroad, suggesting that other factors – both demand and supply – continue to present obstacles to the representation and participation of women in public life. Meier and Lombardo’s article highlights a number of strategies, common to gender mainstreaming, which may assist with both supply- and demand-side blockages to female representation. These include greater attention in public policy agendas to ‘tackling the multiple interconnected factors that create unequal relations between the sexes in fields such as family, work, politics, sexuality, culture and violence’, and increased ‘public knowledge and re-articulation of the mechanisms within electoral systems causing and reproducing gender inequality’.

The fourth article of this special issue written by Jennifer Curtin links the issue of women and politics to the academic study of politics. Political science aspires to increase the availability of reliable information about, and explanations for the distribution, exercise and effects of power. The discipline thus has a central role to play in identifying when and how gender is a variable in the unequal distribution of power. Increasingly, however, questions are being asked about how gendered practices and norms within the discipline affect its capacity to fulfil this role effectively. At stake in this debate is the extent to which political science acts to identify, explain and provide strategies for the correction of gender inequality, and the extent to which it perpetuates such inequalities by failing to recognize them, adequately account for their persistence, or develop measures to minimize their causes and effects. Growing international evidence demonstrates how embedded gender bias within the discipline can affect decisions about research, teaching, recruitment, retention and promotion processes.

In her article ‘Women and political science in New Zealand: the state of the discipline’, Jennifer Curtin contributes to this debate by providing the first comprehensive assessment of women’s position in the discipline in New Zealand. Her findings demonstrate that there have been some significant advances within the discipline, particularly in the appointment of women into tenured academic positions. Women now make up around 32.6 per cent of political scientists employed at the level of lecturer and above in New Zealand, up from 6.8 per cent in 1974 and 12.5 per cent in 1996. While this undoubtedly represents progress, women are still significantly under-represented in all political science departments in New Zealand, particularly in the senior ranks of associate professor and professor. At the time of her research in 2012 Curtin found that only 2.2 per cent of professors in political science in New Zealand were female. She identifies a number of factors unique to New Zealand, such as the PBRF process, that might have exacerbated the barriers to women’s promotion identified in the international literature.

This international literature on the presence and position of women in political science is examined by Claire Timperley in her review article ‘Women in the academy: key studies on gender in political science’. Drawing together the results of empirical studies from the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Finland, Timperley’s article details the five factors commonly thought to explain women’s lack of sustained progression in the discipline: the double bind, gender devaluation, the ‘chilly climate’, the culture of research, and the chronological crunch. She also reports on a range of strategies that have been developed internationally to counter these barriers to women’s progress in the discipline, with mentoring generally found to be a successful and valuable approach.

A final contribution to this special issue comes from Marian Sawer’s research note ‘Misogyny and misrepresentation: women in Australian parliaments’, in which she reflects on women’s under-representation in Australian federal and state parliaments. There, too, women’s parliamentary representation seems to have peaked at just over 30 per cent of all MPs, and has actually fallen in the current parliaments to a total of 28 per cent. Sawer draws a link between women’s under-representation in parliaments and women’s misrepresentation in the Australian media. The numerous examples she provides of overtly misogynistic treatment of Prime Minister Julia Gillard by both the media and opposition MPs go some way towards illustrating how the media’s treatment of women in public life might suppress the ‘supply’ of women into Australian parliamentary politics. More positively, Sawer identifies new feminist mobilizations occurring in response to some particularly egregious examples of sexism in the Australian media in 2012. In keeping with Schuster’s conclusions about the growing potential of online media for political activism, the most potent of these mobilizations, ‘Destroy the Joint’, was a Facebook campaign. Gillard’s much publicized ‘misogyny’ speech, delivered in the Australian Federal Parliament in October 2012, in which she listed numerous examples of sexist behaviour by the Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott, similarly gained tremendous national and international exposure through online media. Sawer documents how gender has re-emerged as an election issue in 2013 and hails various efforts to publicize and resist discriminatory and abusive treatment of female politicians, as ‘silence over sexism is unlikely to encourage other women to take up political careers’.

To conclude, women’s under-representation in politics, gender differences in political attitudes, and the dynamic nature of feminist theory are issues that deserve our continuing attention. We hope this special issue of Political Science on Women and Politics will prompt further scholarly debate about how to address gender differences and inequalities in politics and in our discipline. Despite the remarkable similarity in focus and conclusions between the 1993 and the current special issue, improvements in women’s role and presence in politics can be seen, and important social and cultural changes have taken place during the past two decades. One such major change has been the introduction of the internet and new social media. As suggested in this issue, they have a major potential for political activism and feminist mobilization, offer interesting avenues for future research, and can be a valuable data source for scholars.