The paper focuses on the determinants of women´s inclusion in provincial cabinet positions in the 24 Argentine subnational jurisdictions (23 provinces and the Autonomous District of Buenos Aires City). While so far much of the gender and politics literature has looked at the increment and/or the causes of women´s representation in national legislatures and ministerial cabinets, we focus on the evolution of women´s representation in provincial cabinets. Since Argentina is a federal country and most public policies are decentralized to provincial governments, analyzing the presence of women in cabinet positions would contribute, not only to the study of women´s descriptive and substantive representation in Argentina, but also to a comparative analysis with other federalist regimes, and the impact on gender equality policies. Using an original time series dataset for 1990-2013 we test a number of hypotheses to explain the variation in the number of women appointed to cabinet positions. Independent variables are: degree of economic and social development of the provinces, degree of subnational democracy, size of provincial cabinets and type of electoral system (including the year the provincial quota law was passed), women´s representation in provincial legislatures, and sex and political orientation of governors. We found that for women the likelihood to be appointed in cabinet positions increases when the size of the cabinets is higher, and when the degree of economic and social development is higher. The importance of women numbers increases with the years and the political party in power. We also assess the type of women´s appointments in ministerial cabinets.
