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 of 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 the policy domain where we label posts as Economic, Social Welfare, or Central. The second categorizes them posts 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). Finally, we separately re-estimate the above models by sex to determine whether backgrounds and connections work differently for men than women.
