In this essay, I start to sketch a research agenda about an electoral backlash against women's descriptive representation. Few scholars have considered the possibility of such a backlash. By “backlash,” I mean resistance to attempts to change the status quo. As Jane Mansbridge and Shauna Shames argue in this issue, when actors disadvantaged by the status quo work to enact change, they may be met by a reaction by those seeking to maintain existing power arrangements. In the following pages, I introduce the idea of a backlash against women's representation, propose several preliminary hypotheses about a backlash, and discuss ways of testing them.

Iris Young was a wide-ranging political and social theorist whose works transformed the study of democratic theory, theories of justice, multiculturalism, nationalism, and group rights, among others—all of this in addition to her enormous contribution to feminist theory. Young left not only specific substantive legacies but also her method as a critical social theorist: She sought to undertake projects that helped make sense of the claims and analyses made by progressive social movements, including feminist movements, by providing a philosophical grounding for those claims and analyses. She trained her critical eye on political and social institutions, aiming to expose relations of domination and other injustices.

In November 2005, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became the first female elected head of state in sub-Saharan Africa. On the face of it, the fact that this important breakthrough occurred in Liberia may seem paradoxical given that Liberia recently came out of years of conflict and is one of the poorest countries in the world. Generally, the advancement of women politically has been associated with the economic advancement of a country (Inglehart and Norris 2003). However, Johnson-Sirleaf's victory is consistent with new trends on the continent regarding women's political leadership. Ten years ago, African women held just 10.7% of the seats in their legislatures, falling below the global average at the time of 12.2%. Today, women in Africa hold 17% of legislative seats, matching the global average. In several countries, women have made far greater progress: They hold nearly 50% of legislative seats in Rwanda (48.8%) and over 30% of seats in Mozambique, South Africa, Burundi, and Tanzania.

Women are disproportionately underrepresented in political science, but even more so in the field of international relations and especially at its highest ranks. Moreover, women tend to research different topics than men and teach in markedly different ways from their male counterparts. These are the findings of the 2006 Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) Survey carried out by Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney. Their article details the results of their survey and offers some explanations for these differences. Four leading scholars of international relations—Mary Ann Tétreault, Brooke Ackerly, Jacqui True, and Laura Sjoberg react to these findings and offer diverse perspectives in analyzing the implications of the TRIP survey findings for women scholars and for the broader field of international relations.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the history of women's involvement in liberation struggles and the realignment of gender relations following independence have long been characterized as a kind of gender backlash. Whether national independence from colonial or settler rule was achieved in connection with nationalist movements or armed struggles, the scenarios of gender relations are remarkably similar. Particular groups of women are mobilized during the struggle for national liberation, their issues become part of the liberation movements' agendas, but following the achievement of independence, these same women are rapidly demobilized and the issues they raised during the national liberation struggle get marginalized amid competing and “more urgent” state priorities. Scholars have illuminated the historical and cultural specificities of this pattern in particular cases (Geiger 1997; Kruks, Rapp, and Young 1989; Seidman 1984 and 1999; Tétreault 1992; Urdang 1989). While this pattern fits with colloquial understandings of backlash, identifying the pattern does little to shed light on how state power gets infused with gender meaning in postindependence politics or how these power dynamics evolve.

How do we make sense of the contradictory claims embedded in these two views articulated by the same scholar over a 15-year interval? Is the mature feminist philosopher writing in the leading journal of feminist scholarship in 1994 repudiating the neophyte socialist feminist who published in Socialist Review? Are we glimpsing a familiar feminist trajectory from Marxism to socialist feminism to poststructuralism? Do these two claims represent a discursive shift in how one writes feminist theory or a change in philosophical views?

Recently there has been an extraordinary increase in female political leaders across the globe. In addition to Chile, Finland, Germany and Liberia—considered in this issue—Ukraine, Argentina, India, and several other countries have recently inaugurated their first female executives. A closer examination, however, reveals that female executives are not exactly poised to take over the world. Most of the new female executives are not running geopolitically powerful countries. In that sense, Angela Merkel is not a typical exemplar of the new female executive. Merkel is the only woman leading a Group of Eight (G8) country. She is also the only female head of state in NATO and the only female head of state in the European Union.

Women now receive political science degrees in record numbers, but female representation among political science faculty still lags behind that of many other disciplines. Only 26% of the 13,000 political science professors in the United States today are women (Sedowski and Brintall 2007). According to our recent survey of international relations faculty in the United States—the 2006 Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) Survey—women comprise an even smaller proportion of IR scholars: 77% of the IR faculty respondents are men, while only 23% are women. Even more than their counterparts in the wider field of political science, women in IR tend to be more junior and less likely to hold tenure than their male colleagues. Women comprise a minority at every level of the profession, but they are most scarce at the full professor level: Only 17% of political science professors and 14% of IR professors are women (Maliniak et al. 2007c; Sedowski and Brintall 2007).

Not quite 15 years ago, the International Studies Association (ISA) sponsored an investigation into the status of women in the profession. Most of the conclusions were not too far from what Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael Tierney report in this issue: Women are underrepresented among academics in political science as a whole, and especially in the field of international relations. They also are underrepresented in higher academic ranks. Although they publish at about the same rate as their male counterparts, women's work is far less likely to be cited or mentioned as influential in the field. The “Women in International Relations” study by Maliniak and his coauthors shows that not much has changed—or has it?

This is how political scientist Aili Mari Tripp poignantly highlighted some of the differences between Finnish and U.S. presidential campaigns in an essay on the 2000 presidential elections in Finland. Eight years later, there would be plenty of additional oddities to report, for example, how President Tarja Halonen acquired and happily embraced a new image as a Conan O'Brien look-alike (surely every woman's dream!) and the subsequent meeting between both red-haired personae in her residence during her second-term presidential campaign. On a more serious note, however, the basics of the greater narrative of politics remain the same: That is, since 1994, all three presidential elections in Finland have culminated in a second round in a race between a female and a male candidate for popular support. As a result, Foreign Minister Tarja Halonen was elected as the first woman president of the country in 2000 and reelected in 2006.

In this brief contribution, we highlight some of the ways Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference has served as both a touchstone and a challenge to feminist political theorists struggling to deal with the complexities of “equality” and community. We look briefly at three seemingly different cases, showing how Young's critique of impartiality in this book helps to illuminate what is wrong with the recent Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. It also helps us clarify our thinking about how to remedy unequal access to reproductive technologies and shows how the recognition of group difference is an important counterweight to a false universality.

In 1990, the same year Iris Marion Young published Justice and the Politics of Difference, she also published a volume of essays called Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. The title essay in this volume, along with several others in the same volume, explores a range of women's embodied and sentient experiences, using a style of phenomenology explicitly indebted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The election of Michelle Bachelet as president of Chile on January 15, 2006, was an historical milestone for women and gender equity, both in her own country and for Latin America in general, where women have made significant gains in terms of parliamentary representation but continue to confront great difficulties in being elected as heads of state. Bachelet's election as the first female president was astonishing and surprising in many respects. In contrast to the experiences of other societies where women have been competing for high-ranking offices for quite some time (see Holli in this issue), Bachelet was only the second woman ever to run for president in Chile, following Gladys Marin, a longtime Communist Party leader who ran for president in the 1999 election and won less than 4% of the vote.

In this essay we use a basic feminist analytical tool, intersectionality, to understand why we do not see more women across the spectrum and at all levels in the international relations field in the United States. Our intersectional analysis reveals that to understand why women are underrepresented in IR, we should not look harder at women in IR but rather at IR as a discipline.

The survey data in “Women in International Relations” explains that women are underrepresented in international relations as a whole, and that this underrepresentation only grows at the higher ranks of our profession. In observing the “gender gap” in IR, the essay offers an interesting and important overview of the possible reasons for women's underrepresentation and points out some meaningful differences between women and men in terms of perspective in the discipline, publication productivity, and teaching style, among other things. Near the beginning of the essay, the authors set up alternative explanations for women's marginal position in the discipline. They note that while feminist scholars relate women's marginalization to gender subordination, “other scholars suggest that the content of women's scholarship contributes to their marginalization” (see p. 122). I would argue that women's differences and gender subordination might not be competing explanations for women's marginalization. Instead, it might be that gender subordination can explain both women's differences and women's underrepresentation in the field.

I would like to begin with an observation about Iris Marion Young's legacy. She has set us very high standards. Her approach to justice was far from the Rawlsian notion that the way to proceed is to consider what principles we would agree to if we were in some ideal, hypothetical situation. She was concerned with the here and now: What does justice ask of us in a very unequal, unjust, and hardly democratic world? She insisted that justice has exacting requirements. She questioned “the common intuition that the moral claims of justice ought not to be too demanding on individuals” (2004, 383). As members of the privileged rich part of the world's population, we have a responsibility to do all that we can to further justice, but she also argued that the oppressed too should do whatever they could. She wanted us to get out of our academic offices, at least sometimes, into the real world—and, unusually, she did so. She practised what she preached.