Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective

Pamela Paxton is professor of sociology and public affairs and the Christine and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor in the Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in economics and sociology and her PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has consulted for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Academies. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles on women in politics, which focus on statistical models of women’s parliamentary representation. Her research has appeared in a variety of journals, including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. She is also an author of Nonrecursive Models: Endogeneity, Reciprocal Relationships, and Feedback Loops (2011).

Melanie M. Hughes is associate professor of sociology at The University of Pittsburgh. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 with a degree in sociology and government and earned her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2008. Her affiliations include the Department of Political Science; the Ford Institute for Human Security; Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies; and Global Studies. She specializes in political representation of women from marginalized groups. Her research on women in politics has appeared in journals such as American Sociological Review, American Political Science Review, Social Forces, and Politics & Gender. Currently, she is consulting with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme to increase the availability of data on women in political leadership and public administration. She is also writing a new book on the political dominance of men from majority racial, ethnic, and religious groups worldwide.