ABSTRACT
As late as the second half of the 1980s, there were, for all intents and purposes, no women in executive positions (president, vice president, cabinet minister) in Latin America. For instance, in 1987 there were no women presidents among the region's democracies, there was a single “second” vice president (in Costa Rica), and an average of only 2 percent women in cabinets, with the median and modal number of cabinet ministers in the region's countries zero (Htun 1997; Iturbe de Blanco 2003; PROLID 2007). By the 1990s, however, women had begun, slowly but steadily, to occupy a larger share of executive branch positions in the region, although the record was mixed, with advances more prominent in appointed cabinet posts than among directly elected presidents and vice presidents.
