The rise of more egalitarian attitudes toward the roles of women and men, documented in this book, the transformation of lifestyles, families, the workplace, and the public sphere, has been experienced as part of our lives during the last quarter-century. Both of the authors started to explore these trends many years ago; an integral part of The Silent Revolution (1977) was an attempt to explain the underlying causes of the social movements and new politics fermenting among the younger generations in North America and Western Europe, including the rise of environmentalism, civil rights in the United States, countercultural community groups, and the second wave women's movement. A decade later, Politics and Sexual Equality (1987) took up the issues of how women's lives were being transformed in Western nations and what had caused the substantial disparities in economic resources and political power. Subsequent work by both authors has returned to these themes on many occasions, but given the substantial political developments and social changes that have occurred during recent decades, it seemed time for a more direct examination of the state of gender equality around the world, in terms of both causes and consequences.

This book owes many debts to friends and colleagues. Some preliminary ideas were first sketched out in articles published in the International Political Science Review and the Journal of Democracy.