What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases in women's political representation? We argue that norm diffusion has larger positive effects on women's cabinet representation than on women's legislative representation. We also show that within cabinets, norm diffusion affects low-prestige appointments more than highprestige appointments. We test these arguments using an original database of ministers from 1979 to 2009 and find that the association of women's representation with three separate indicators of international diffusionlevels of women's representation among neighboring states, levels of women's representation among intergovernmental organization partners, and time since ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women-is consistent with our arguments.Women make up more than 50% of the world's population, but they are dramatically underrepresented in the world's most powerful decisionmaking bodies. In 2011, 19.3% of the world's national legislators and 16.0% of the world's cabinet ministers were women. Still, women have recently made substantial gains. Levels of women's representation moved sharply upward beginning in the 1990s (see Figure 1). The number of countries with all-male cabinets declined steadily.What factors explain the recent, relatively rapid global rise in the ranks of women political leaders? To date, scholars have focused on domestic sources of variation, calling attention to the roles of social structural, ideological, and political variables. Yet, the increasing visibility of international commitments to gender-balanced decision making and the coincident sudden upward ticks in women's representation suggest that international factors may also be affecting national outcomes. This article investigates the extent to which states' international interactions have propelled women's gains.While political scientists (Krook and True 2012) and sociologists (Paxton, Hughes, and Green 2006) have examined the evolution of a norm

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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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Which factors explain variation in the gendered composition of governing cabinets? To address this question, we transpose the idea of proportionality between legislative seat shares and cabinet seats shares from studies of the partisan composition of cabinets to studies of the gender composition of cabinets. Gamson's law identifies a strong association between the proportion of legislative seats a party contributes to a governing coalition and the proportion of seats the party receives in the cabinet. We attempt to gender Gamson's law. We develop a theory of why a gendered Gamson's logic should apply to cabinets in parliamentary systems. We test our intuition via analysis of a new dataset covering 18 OECD parliamentary systems from 1990 through early 2019. We find a strong relationship between the gendered distribution of seats in governing parties’ parliamentary delegations and the gendered distribution of seats in the cabinets those parties create.