The White House Gender Policy Council (GPC) was established by President Joe Biden in 2021. It built on earlier offices like the White House Council on Women and Girls, which was created during the Barack Obama administration but was dissolved under the first Donald Trump administration, and the White House Office for Women’s Initiatives and Outreach, which existed during the Bill Clinton administration but was eliminated by the George W. Bush administration. The GPC was responsible for the advancement of gender equity and equality in both domestic and foreign policy. Jennifer Klein (JK) and Rachel Vogelstein (RV) served, respectively, as Director and Deputy Director until the GPC was dismantled by the second Trump administration in 2025. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on February 16, 2026.

The Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) served as the agency’s lead responsible for implementing the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Act of 2017 and the 2023 U.S. Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security. Tazreen Hussain (TH) served as the USAID Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor from 2024 to 2025. In early 2025, the Donald Trump administration officially shut down USAID, including the women, peace, and security portfolio. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on December 12, 2025.

The United States Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons was established by presidential mandate and sat in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. The position was established in 2015 when John Kerry served as the U.S. Secretary of State during the second Barack Obama administration. It did not exist during the first Donald Trump administration. Special Envoy Jessica Stern (JS) became the second person to hold this position when she was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021. The post has not existed since January 2025. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 5, 2026.

The United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues led the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State. The position was created in 2009 when Hillary Clinton served as U.S. Secretary of State during the administration of Barack Obama. Ambassador Geeta Rao Gupta (GRG) was the fourth Ambassador-at-Large and the first woman of color to hold the position. In 2025, the Ambassadorship and Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues were eliminated by the Donald Trump administration. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on February 4, 2026.

The Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) led the Agency’s work on LGBTQI+ issues, integrating LGBTQI+ people across all inclusive development programs, policies, research, and training. The position was created in 2014 during the administration of Barack Obama to ensure that the promotion and protection of LGBTQI+ rights were fully incorporated into all aspects of USAID’s work. Jay Gilliam (JG) was appointed during the Joe Biden administration as the second Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator, as the position remained vacant during the first Donald Trump administration. In 2025, Trump dismantled the entire Agency, including the LGBTQI+ portfolio. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 28, 2026.

Policymakers influence citizens’ behavior through language and through policy. In this study, we build on this distinction and use Large Language Models to study how fathers are talked about, i.e., portrayals of fathers, in parliamentary documents. The case is Sweden, a forerunner in policies encouraging an engaged father. Portrayals of fathers are related to policymaking and to fathers’ use of parental leave. The results show that an active fatherhood role dominates over a passive role in this type of documents, and that an active positive role dominates over an active negative role. However, over time (1993–2021) there is a narrowing of the gap between mentions of active positive and active negative fatherhood roles, which coincides with stalled developments in fathers’ use of parental leave. We conclude that portrayals of fathers are more mixed than expected and theorize about a signaling mechanism through which language surrounding fathers may influence their behavior.

Feminism has been a major equalizing social movement that has faced powerful resistance. To better understand such opposition, we conceptualize, measure, and analyze perceptions of feminism as a threat, using a novel survey measure of feminism-related threat perceptions in Spain. Our results show that general psychological predispositions to feel threatened are among the most important predictors of perceptions of feminism as a threat. Contrary to expectations, women feel similarly threatened by feminism as men, which is driven by women’s generally higher predisposition to feel threatened. Further, men’s and women’s perceptions of feminism as threatening are associated with different political profiles: Men who feel threatened by feminism tend to sympathize with the far right, while women who feel threatened by feminism do not have a particular political profile. Our results highlight that feminism faces challenges that go beyond the expected anti-feminist attitudes driven by the intersection of gender and ideology.

Since the 1960s, increasing numbers of women have won the highest office in the world’s democracies despite clear gender effects in gaining office. But does reelection show the same gendered effects? Recent research suggests that compared to male leaders, women leaders often come to high office in more difficult conditions; enter with lower approval ratings; and experience more rapid decline in ratings over time. We know little, however, about the conditions that affect their odds of reelection. Does the type of office—president or prime minister—matter? Do economic and political conditions during their tenure affect their odds of success? We analyze gender and leader reelection across electoral democracies in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia,1960–2023. We show that among leaders eligible to run, men and women have roughly equal odds of winning. We also find that women run somewhat more often than men.

Transnational anti-trans actors fall into two camps: traditionally conservative actors who pursue transphobia to extend patriarchy and feminists who pursue transphobia to challenge patriarchy. This article investigates how shared language and practices of anti-trans feminist and traditionalist coalitions enact opposing sex/gender orders. I explain this alliance through grounded theory generated from a critical discourse analysis of my dataset of 1016 anti-trans texts from 175 organizations. I develop my Affective Orientation Threat Structure, which explains the affective governing process of this coalition, and then apply this framework to anti-trans discourses about trans threats to womanhood. I find that anti-trans feminists and traditionalists generate fear via shared threat constructions but frame threat differently in order to mobilize affective energy in service of diverging regulative regimes and sex/gender orders. I argue that the illogics produced by contradictions within this incompatible coalition benefit both camps by maximizing affective disorientation and generating momentum through paradox.

No matter the methodology, gaining access to potential research participants is one of the more difficult aspects of conducting field research. Sometimes, potential participants may be “hard to reach”—for example, they are physically located in remote areas where the lack of infrastructure necessitates extensive travel and/or difficult logistics. Alternatively, they may be “vulnerable” due to disenfranchisement (incarcerated populations), stigma (those living with HIV/AIDS), or at risk if they share their experiences (people living in authoritarian states). Or participants may be “hidden”—that is, no record of their experiences exists, which, in turn, makes it difficult to find and recruit them (Ellard-Gray et al. 2015).1

This article examines how Latina Republican Congressional candidates frame themselves as both embodying and representing the “real Latino electorate,” who they claim has been ignored in the U.S. political arena. In this article, I engage in an in-depth analysis of these candidates — including content analyses of their public interviews, speeches, advertisements, websites, newspaper coverage, and social media presences — in four border districts in Texas. I find that the ways in which these candidates strategically reframe Latinidad and the immigrant experience to align with Republican ideology allow these candidates to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform while simultaneously engaging in the Latino threat narrative that dehumanizes the very community they claim to represent. More specifically, these candidates articulate an alternate, intersectional vision of Latinidad which presents Latino immigrant women and children as victims, Latino immigrant men as criminals, and themselves as unique authorities on immigration given their status as border patrol wives. These candidates’ race-gender consciousness also allows these candidates to express political anger, which has generally been denied to women of color in the Republican Party. In so doing, they offer a pointed critique claiming that Latinos are a captured group in American political parties.

While abortion has been a contentious and salient political issue in the United States for decades, the debate around abortion has evolved in terms of the rhetorical frames employed by advocates on both sides. Using vignettes of statements made by hypothetical lawmakers, we evaluate responsiveness to some of these emergent frames. Specifically, we evaluate “pro-woman” framing employed by pro-life advocates, which positions abortion restrictions as being in the interests of women. The experiment also manipulates to whom the frame is attributed in two ways, the gender and the partisanship of the lawmaker. This 2 × 2 × 2 experiment explores the intersection of how abortion restrictions are framed, including the roles gender and partisanship in the persuasiveness of the frames. We find that voters are more receptive to the pro-woman frame compared to the classic fetal rights framing. Importantly, this holds even among supporters of abortion rights, casting substantial light on persuadable groups.

Measuring the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation presents empirical and theoretical challenges. This article makes a distinctive empirical contribution that draws on the latest theoretical developments on the substantive representation of women (SRW). I provide an explorative qualitative analysis of representative claims in French parliamentary debates over a twenty-year period. I focus on three core questions: who is making claims? What are the claims saying? Which women are represented by the claims? The analysis considers the interplay between these questions and finds that SRW is complex and full of contestations. Most SRW comes from women and parties of the left, while most resistance (anti-SRW) comes from men and parties of the right. However, some women cross party lines to work together, while ideological differences emerge between women sharing descriptive traits. Crucially, I find that support for SRW is often restricted to claims that uphold the gendered and racialized status quo.

Self-placement measures of masculinity and femininity have been gaining popularity in political science research, but questions remain about their long-term stability and the extent to which political views may impact gender identities. Taking advantage of two waves of measures of masculinity and femininity self-placement in an online panel, a categorical measure of masculinity and femininity (making use of a six-point scale, anchored scale) is found to be both highly stable and more stable than a scalar measure (making use of a 0 to 100 scale). The scalar measure is also found to be responsive to political views, such that men who report support for Donald Trump in the US Presidential elections identify as more masculine in the follow-up study. Overall, both measures are found to be relatively stable, bolstering the case that they are measuring a stable underlying construct.

Intersectionality is increasingly being operationalized as part of gender mainstreaming efforts across national and multilateral contexts. One prominent example can be located in Sweden’s 2015 institutional commitment to centering future gender equality policy in an intersectional analysis. This article explores the complexities of institutionalizing intersectionality in Swedish gender equality policy processes, drawing on the situated insights of public sector gender experts and Afro-Swedish feminist activists and politicians. Key findings include the prevalence of additive interpretations of intersectionality that privilege gender, limitations in statistical practices, and uneven commitments to intersectional policymaking across different institutional contexts. Recommendations for enhancing intersectional policymaking include the incorporation of ‘Equity Data’ and qualitative insights through structured dialogues with intersectionally marginalized communities. Ultimately, this article emphasizes the necessity of centering the voices of both institutional insiders and intersectionally marginalized stakeholders to address the shortcomings of intersectional practice to enhance its transformative potential in Sweden.

Research shows that women’s inclusion in decision-making bodies that produce anti-feminist policies can legitimize policies and institutions. When a woman attorney advocates for an anti-feminist outcome in the judiciary, are the courts perceived as more legitimate than when a man makes the same argument? Using a survey experiment where 1,395 participants read about a sexual harassment case argued by a male or female attorney, we find that female attorneys increase the legitimacy of anti-feminist rulings in only one specific instance: when a female attorney represents an employer and wins, and only for female participants who are much less likely to perceive that process as procedurally legitimate in the first place. Our results demonstrate that while there are some instances where attorney gender can legitimize judicial behavior, the courts are different from legislatures, and deploying women to advocate for anti-women outcomes has little impact on feelings of court legitimacy broadly.

Following a 2018 FEC ruling, US congressional candidates are increasingly using campaign funds for childcare expenses incurred while campaigning. This policy has the potential to increase descriptive representation, but the policy’s viability is dependent on how voters react to candidates using campaign funds for childcare. Using a national survey experiment, we find that the framing around the use of this policy influences public opinion in meaningful ways. For Democratic respondents, positive framing treatments increase support for a hypothetical woman candidate, and candidate attack frames do not decrease candidate support. For Republican respondents, positive framing treatments do not increase candidate support, while candidate attack frames decrease candidate support. Regarding support for the policy of permitting the use of campaign funds for childcare, results were universally positive. Both positive and negative frames increased support for the policy. This research contributes to multiple literatures by evaluating the public opinion effects of candidates using campaign funds for childcare.

While scholarship on feminist foreign policy continues to proliferate, the impact of anti-feminist objectives on foreign policy requires attention. In this article, I critically examine the intersection of abortion politics and U.S. foreign policy, arguing that American foreign policy has long been shaped by an anti-feminist practice. The U.S. has systematically restricted access to abortion abroad for over 50 years through legislation and executive actions. Applying quantitative and qualitative research methods, I trace the history of abortion-related foreign policy from 1973 to 2022, analyze all congressional foreign policy bills referencing abortion, and draw on interviews with legislative staff and issue advocates from the 115th Congress (2017-18) to highlight how anti-abortion advocacy shapes U.S. foreign policy decisions. These findings suggest that while feminist mobilization has constrained anti-abortion efforts domestically in the US, foreign policy remained a key battleground where anti-feminist actors have historically been more successful. This case underscores the importance of analyzing domestic policy dynamics to understand the broader implications of feminist and anti-feminist agendas in international relations.

How do women ex-combatants navigate rebel-to-party transformations? While many rebel groups transition into political parties after conflicts, the gendered dynamics of these processes remain underexplored. This article theorizes how militarized social reproductive (MSR) labor—care, emotional, and community work embedded in the armed struggle—can shape women’s postwar political trajectories. MSR can constrain agency through socialization that can reinforce gender norms that marginalize women from politics, yet MSR can also enable collective post-war mobilization through organizational memory. We identify two factors that condition these effects: (1) whether women’s units performed gender normative or transgressive activities and (2) the degree of unit cohesion. Drawing on interviews with members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Women Auxiliary Brigade (BIWAB)—the all-female unit of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines—we show how gender-normative roles led to exclusion, but internal cohesion enabled BIWAB members to repurpose their shared labor into informal political advocacy.

Germany’s 2023 Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) Guidelines commit to a transformative, intersectional agenda across diplomacy, security, and climate policy, but omit migration. This article examines how and why migration was excluded, despite its centrality to foreign policy and the involvement of civil society in the drafting process. Drawing on practice theory, Black feminist and postcolonial scholarship, we analyze state–civil society consultations as a community of practice shaped by epistemic hierarchies based on race and coloniality. We show how the Foreign Office’s reliance on established, Germany-based policy actors with limited expertise in gendered mobility sidelined migration as a feminist concern. The consultation format constrained participation and reinforced boundaries around what counted as legitimate feminist knowledge. Bridging literature on migration and FFP, the article advances understandings of how institutional and epistemic power shape feminist policy-making. It calls for a more inclusive FFP attentive to the gendered and racialized dynamics of mobility.