In person icon Women's Leadership and Political Representation in Asia

Abstract

This panel examines female political leadership and women's political representation across Asia. It looks both at differences across countries and regions within Asia as well as why Asia, as the world's most populated continent, has fallen behind other world regions in terms of women in local and national parliaments and in positions of leadership within elected and appointed assemblies. The first two papers address macro-level concerns of achieving a critical mass of women in parliament and on influential committees within parliament. With only a few exceptions, Asian parliaments fall behind global norms on both counts and these papers examine why this might be the case. The second two papers then provide detailed case studies of women's concrete and strategic struggles for political inclusion. The first examines women's struggles for political participation in Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas. The second one examines the difficulties of instituting gender quotas in municipal elections in South Korea. Together these papers present cutting edge research from leading scholars on contemporary developments in Asia impacting hundreds of millions of women and men. They offer new empirical contributions and theoretical advances on women's leadership and political representation relevant to a highly populated but still largely under-studied region.