Gender on the Agenda: Lessons from the United Kingdom 1

In Chapter 4, I showed how understanding the connections between policy insiders and outsiders helps explain how President Carter’s promise of a more gender-diverse bench emerged and became a reality, even though feminists had advocated for it previously. Looking at a gender policy case reveals important dimensions of policy implementation that have been overlooked. In this chapter, I examine the concept of agenda-setting—the process of transforming a condition into a problem that the government must solve. Theories of agenda-setting generally postulate elements of magnitude and sequence: that is, sufficient consensus must first be reached to produce a tipping point or identifiable moment when the issue is indisputably on the agenda. Conventional accounts hold that this process involves convincing sufficient numbers of people that a problem exists by creating a groundswell or consensus around the issue. My evidence will show that policy changes that increased women’s representation on the bench in Britain occurred without such a groundswell or consensus. The story of how the absence of women from higher judicial office in the United Kingdom ² came to be seen as a problem that the government had to address is very different from Chapter 4’s account of the United States. The machinations that lead to the appointment of women judges vary from state to state, country to country, and even between international organizations. Extending our scope of inquiry to gender (and also the third branch of government, the judiciary) improves our understanding of agenda-setting. As with the concepts in the previous chapters, looking at agenda-setting through a gender lens alters and deepens our understanding.