This book offers a comprehensive and in-depth overview of how public policy is shaping gender equality in Europe.

"[A] well-integrated volume by...one of the best known political scientists working on women and politics.... [It] includes contributions by leading scholars in the field, and provides a well-written and accessible overview of the impact of women in office at every level..." -- Pippa Norris, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University "This [book] will be the standard-bearer not simply because it contains most of the early research in the field but more importantly, because of the wide-ranging scope and diversity of the research and the subsequently nuanced and contextualized arguments presented."-Beth Reingold, Emory University In recent years the numbers of women serving in public offices at various levels of government have increased markedly. Is the increasing presence of women in public office making a difference? Are women public officials having a distinctive impact on public policy and the political process? These questions are central to the studies in The Impact of Women in Public Office. These studies examine the impact of women public officials serving in various offices and locales at local, state, and national levels. They are the product of a large, coordinated research project sponsored by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University and funded by the Charles H. Revson Foundation. The subjects of these studies range from a single, very prominent U.S. Senator, who served in Congress from the early 1940s to the early 1970s, to local council members in a New Jersey county in the 1980s. They include state legislators from across the country. The research presented in this volume offers compelling evidence that women public officials do have a gender-related impact on public policy and the political process. Nevertheless, context matters; these studies demonstrate that the impact of women public officials varies considerably across political environments. Finally, the research in this volume suggests that identification with feminism and/or of particular racial or ethnic group also influence how and to what extent women public officials are making a difference. Contributors include Edith J. Barrett, Susan Abrams Beck, Janet K. Boles, Susan J. Carroll, Debra L. Dodson, Lyn Kathlene, Elaine Martin, Nancy E. McGlen, Meredith Reid Sarkees, Janann Sherman, Sue Thomas, Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, and Susan Welch.

Women and Public Policies, praised by Janet Boles as "the first attempt to deal with several women's policies in a systematic manner within a common framework," analyzes how the women's movement of the 1970s influenced federal policy. The authors treat four issues- credit, education, pregnancy disability, and abortion rights- as case studies, measuring the successes and failures of the women's movement in these representative policy areas.

This book provides comparative data and policy benchmarks on women's access to public leadership and inclusive gender-responsive policy-making across OECD countries.

The contributors examine the ways in which cultural change in the United States has created a need for public policy, and conversely, how public policy has led to cultural change. Issues include education, health care, equal economic opportunity, child care, and the justice system.

Violence against women is one of the most insidious social ills facing the world today. Yet governmental response is inconsistent, ranging from dismissal to aggressive implementation of policies and programs to combat the problem. In her comparative study of thirty-six democratic governments, Laurel Weldon examines the root causes and consequences of the differences in public policy from Northern Europe to Latin America. She reveals that factors that often influence the development of social policies do not determine policies on violence against women. Neither economic level, religion, region, nor the number of women in government determine governmental responsiveness to this problem. Weldon demonstrates, for example, that Nordic governments take no more action to combat violence against women than Latin American governments, even though the Swedish welfare state is often considered a leader in social policy, particularly with regard to women’s issues. Instead, the presence of independently organized, active women’s movements plays a greater role in placing violence against women on the public agenda. The breadth and scope of governmental response is greatly enhanced by the presence of an office dedicated to promoting women’s status. Weldon closes with practical lessons and insights to improve government action on violence against women and other important issues of social justice and democracy.

The unifying theme of Women and Public Policy is the impact of cultural change on women's roles in American society and patterns of public policy as they affect women and their families. Authors M. Margaret Conway, David W. Ahern, and Gertrude A. Steuernagel explore a broad range of policy areas that affect women, including typical issues such as education, employment, and health, as well as important but frequently overlooked areas such as marriage and family law, child care, and economic equity. Recent events and changes in areas such as welfare reform, adoptions by gay parents, and the Defense of Marriage Act are also discussed in this thoroughly updated second edition.

The World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 190 economies. Its goal is to inform policy discussions on how to remove legal restrictions on women and promote research on how to improve women’s economic inclusion.

This book is a critical resource for understanding the relationship between gender, social policy and women’s activism in Latin America, with specific reference to Chile. Latin America’s mother-centered kinship system makes it an ideal field in which to study motherhood and maternalism—the ways in which motherhood becomes a public policy issue. As maternalism embraces and enhances gender differences, it has been criticized for deepening gender inequalities. Yet invoking motherhood continues to offer an effective strategy for advancing women’s living conditions and rights, and for women themselves to be present in the public sphere. In analyzing these important relationships, the contributors to this volume discuss maternal health, sexual and reproductive rights, labor programs, paid employment, women miners’ unionization, housing policies, environmental suffering, and LGBTQ intimate partner violence.

Women and Politics is a comprehensive examination of women's use of politics in pursuit of gender equality. How can demands for gender equality be reconciled with sex differences? Resolving this paradoxical question has proceeded along two paths: the legal equality doctrine, which emphasizes gender neutrality, and the fairness doctrine, which recognizes differences between men and women. The text's clear analysis and presentation of theory and history helps students to think critically about the difficulties faced by women in politics, and about how public policies in education, labour and the economy, and family and fertility, impact gender equality. The fully-revised fourth edition explores new critical perspectives, recent political events, and current challenges to gender equality, including the 2016 presidential election and Hillary Clinton's candidacy, the fight for equal pay and paid leave, and the debate over reproductive rights and campus sexual assault. It also includes current scholarship on the intersections of race, class, and gender, and expanded coverage of minority women, women in the military, and conservative women. This text, and its two-path framework, is essential to understanding women's pursuit of equality via the political system.