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In the past 50 years, fewer than eighty women worldwide have attained the office of prime minister or president. In 2010, women held just seventeen of the world's 252 executive posts - slightly less than seven percent. In Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact?, Farida Jalalzai explores the patterns of women executive's paths, powers, and potential impacts, examining the global and national mechanisms that prevent women from attaining executive office.
List of contents
Contents; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Women Executives-the Literature; Chapter 3 Women Executives-Positions, Selections, Systems, and Powers; Chapter 4 A More in Depth Analysis of Executive Positions and Paths; Chapter 5 General Backgrounds of Women Leaders; Chapter 6 Specific Pathways to Power: Political Families and Activism; Chapter 7 A Statistical Analysis of Women's Rule; Chapter 8 An Overview of Female Presidential Candidacies; Chapter 9 Close But Not Close Enough-the Historic Candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Segolene Royal; Chapter 10 Conclusions on Women Executives and Directions for Future Research; Appendix; References
About the author
Farida Jalalzai is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Summary
In 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka made history when she was appointed the world's first woman prime minister. In the half-century following her achievement, fewer than eighty women worldwide have attained the office of prime minister or president. In 2010, women held just seventeen of the world's 252 executive posts - slightly less than seven percent. What prevents women from attaining executive office? And why, despite the progress made by women in other political arenas, have these positions remained stubbornly male?
In Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact?, Farida Jalalzai explores the patterns of women executive's paths, powers, and potential impacts. Jalalzai explains the mechanisms that push politically active women into relatively weak posts and why women who successfully attain executive office almost always hail from political families within unstable systems. Combining a broad understanding of global dynamics of executive power with detailed studies of individual women leaders, Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact? analyzes how institutionally embedded gender expectations limit women's representational impact.
Fifty years have passed since Ms. Bandaranaike's appointment. In Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact?, Jalalzai provides a comprehensive and urgently needed analysis of the factors that prevent women from achieving the world's highest political offices.
Additional text
This is an outstanding book. Exhaustively researched, encyclopedic in scope, and elegantly written, Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact? provides insights into the comparative study of gender and leadership in a way that is certain to catapult Farida Jalalzai into the forefront of gender studies and leadership studies.
