Presidents and prime ministers possess vast powers of appointment. These powers can be used to appoint cabinets with an equal number of male and female ministers. Parity cabinets make dramatic statements about gender, representation, and political power. They imply that gender balance—rather than just adding some women—is needed to overcome women's political marginalization. Cabinets with just a few token women are insufficient and undemocratic. Yet appointing women in the same proportions as men challenges a status quo in which men occupy most of the positions of power. Even when leaders possess the formal authority to appoint ministers, forming a parity cabinet means that some existing practices and norms, particularly the norm of male dominance, have been broken. Parity cabinets thus create the possibility of backlash from those who fear reduced opportunities for men to access powerful posts.

The article extends the limited literature on women national leaders by providing a comparative study of two popularly elected women presidents: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Both Bachelet and Johnson-Sirleaf rose to power in situations that lacked the circumstances identified by current literature as mitigating gendered barriers to national leadership: neither woman was connected to politically powerful families, they were elected in presidential systems, and they were elected in countries that lag behind regional leaders in terms of women's political inclusion. This comparison reveals important similarities in how both Bachelet and Johnson-Sirleaf incorporated gender into their campaign strategies. Both women pursued electoral strategies that combined attempts to confront gendered disadvantages and to take advantage of specific gendered opportunities present within their political contexts. Both women drew upon their personal biographies, highlighting their education and careers, and political experience to demonstrate that they had the traditionally masculine traits associated with political leadership. In addition, they also strategically appealed to gendered beliefs about women's unique capabilities and strengths and linked these perceived strengths to pressing political issues in both countries. Our study thus demonstrates the continuing salience of gender, even as its influence becomes more flexible and complex.

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Elsa Chaney once argued that Latin American women turned to motherhood to justify their political participation. Now that Latin American women have gained unprecedented access to national-level office, we ask whether these cultural narratives of maternalism still condition female politicians’ access to political power. Using public opinion data, media analysis, and elite interviews, we conceptualise four strategic frames deployed by elite women to justify their national-level political careers: the traditional supermadre, the technocratic caretaker, the macho minimiser, and the difference denier. We argue that while today's female politicians have developed diverse responses to maternalism, their access to public office remains profoundly shaped by structural constraints and cultural narratives that privilege traditional feminine ideals of caretaking.

We examine women’s access to campaign resources using data from all 960 candidates competing in Chile’s 2017 legislative elections. Even when controlling for district characteristics, women candidates receive less money in party transfers, bank loans, and donations; place fewer personal funds in their campaigns; and have fewer resources overall. However, previous experience and incumbency narrow the gap. When women are newcomers, gender serves as an important cue about candidate quality and funders default to favoring men. Our results lend credence to practitioners’ claims that money disadvantages women candidates in democracies, but focuses attention on the disadvantage faced by women newcomers. Moreover, this gender gap in campaign funding exists despite a gendered electoral financing scheme designed to make political actors more likely to invest in women’s campaigns. While increasingly popular among development experts, our research suggests such schemes might be insufficient for equalizing campaign funding between men and women.

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Women hold less than 10 percent of chief executive positions worldwide. Understanding how women democratically access these posts requires theorizing how they gain resources from established parties to mount viable electoral campaigns. We argue that in stable regimes marked by representational malaise parties respond to gendered incentives and nominate female candidates. Drawing on Latin American cases, we show how diverse parties nominated women in order to signal change or novelty, to credibly commit to “feminine” leadership and issues, and to mobilize female voters. A negative case depicts how a lack of representational critiques can fail to incentivize parties to back women instead of men. Our focus on gendered incentives provides a new framework that places political parties at the center of questions about women’s electoral opportunities.