Historically women have been dramatically underrepresented in executive cabinets and when they are present, they have tended to hold weaker portfolios. Serious change is underway, however, as more women have recently been elected to posts as Prime Ministers and Presidents. A question that remains is whether these female executives will select more (or different) female members of their cabinets. As feminist scholars we can hope that female leaders will act as role models, but female executives can do much more than that. They can directly select more female ministers or different kinds of female ministers. But do they?
This paper focuses on cabinet appointments in Germany. With Angela Merkel as the country’s first female Chancellor, we might expect her to select more women for cabinet positions. On the other hand, parties of the left in general promote more women and Merkel is from a party of the right. Furthermore, since at least the mid-1980s, German Chancellors have come under public pressure to select more women for their cabinets. Thus, if Merkel has selected more women for cabinet, it may be because of changing norms over time rather than because she is female. To disentangle some of these factors, this paper will look at patterns of cabinet appointment over the course of the last three Chancellors, Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schroeder, and Angela Merkel. Each of these Chancellors was elected multiple times and therefore had to form multiple cabinets (four for Kohl, two for Schroeder, and three for Merkel). For each cabinet, this paper will examine the number of men and women in the cabinet, as well as the prior and subsequent careers of both female and male cabinet members in an effort to discover potential patterns over time, by party, by sex of Chancellor and by portfolio.
