Abstract :
The proportion of those elected to national legislatures who are women varies widely, with most
countries falling far short of gender parity. In the average parliament, only 18 per cent of the
members are women, but some countries have nearly obtained gender parity while others have no
women at all in office.1 Most of the comparative, cross-national work on women’s representation
tries to explain differences in the percentage of seats held by women using aggregate-level factors,
such as socio-economic development, political culture or electoral institutions.2 While this answers
an important question about women’s descriptive representation, its dominance has nearly precluded
research on other equally essential and related questions.
