ABSTRACT
The objective of Women in Executive Power: A global overview has been to examine women's participation within the executive branch of government, as chief executives (i.e. presidents and prime ministers [PMs]) or cabinet ministers. In order to accomplish this, Women in Executive Power uses an original approach, namely, comparing experiences across time and across nine geopolitical regions. Each chapter uses the same analytical framework comprised of five aspects. It begins by presenting a regional overview, since World War II, of female participation in government (as executive leaders, cabinet ministers or both). Then, restricting itself to a select number of case studies, it looks at four elements for each country: nature of the political regimes; evolution of female presence within cabinets; socio-cultural, economic and political factors that explain female participation in governments; and finally, the impact that female executives have had on the substantive representation of women. This concluding chapter of the book follows the same five-point structure; we extract a number of observations from each of the sections in order to compile an overall set of lessons learned.
