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Who You Know, What You Know, or Who You Are? Does Background Trump Gender in a Consistent Way in Cabinet Appointments?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Escobar-Lemmon, Maria C. Taylor-Robinson, Michelle M. |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | Women are being appointed to presidential cabinets in increasing number and while they have moved beyond stereotypically female posts in some highly visible ways (e.g. Defense), there are other posts that appear to be a glass ceiling and still others where women are exceedingly rare. Is this due to the absence of a supply of women with the right mix of backgrounds and connections or is there more overt discrimination taking place that channels women into some posts and keeps them out of others? This comparative empirical paper examines a dataset 447 ministers from 16 presidential administrations in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and the United States to shed light on the way background interacts with gender to determine the kind of post a minister receives. In this paper, we categorize all cabinet rank posts in the five countries along three different dimensions. The first relates to the substance of policy domain where we label posts as Economic, Social Welfare, or Central. The second categorizes them as falling into either traditionally masculine or feminine policy domains. Finally, we use public opinion data on the most important problem in a country to construct a dynamic measure of whether a post is high visibility or not. We then statistically model (using logit or multinomial logit as appropriate) the kind of post a minister receives (Economics vs. Social Welfare vs. Central types; feminine vs. masculine policy domains; and high visibility vs. non-high visibility). Our analysis reveals that while outright gender discrimination may not be occurring in these cabinets (in terms of women not getting posts because they are women), backgrounds and connections work differently for men than women and may suggest that subtle gender biases are still at work. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/01092fd0-f2a7-408c-981a-bb636d17225a.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
