Selected Readings - Cultural Barriers to Women's Leadership: A Worldwide Comparison
This paper tests a series of four hypotheses about the relationship between a society’s political culture and gender equality in political leadership. In 2000, worldwide women represented only one in seven parlimentarians, one in ten cabinet ministers, and one in twenty Heads of State or Government. Projections based on the current place of global change indicate that women will achieve parity in parliaments a century from now. How did (political) culture contribute to this situation?
The four hypotheses are:
- there are substantial differences in attitudes towards women’s leadership in post-industrial, post-Communist and developing societies;
- traditional attitudes are a major barrier to the election of women to parliament;
- culture continues to prove a significant influence on the proportion of women parliamentarians even controlling for social structural and political institutions;
- there is evidence that these cultural barriers have been fading among the younger generation in postindustrial societies as a result of modernization.
The authors draw on evidence from the World Values Surveys in 55 societies with data drawn from the most recent wave conducted in 1995 – 99.