International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

‘Women's participation’ is our Topic of the Month for March 2023. On this topic, enjoy Free Access to this article by Julia C Lerch, Evan Schofer, David John Frank, Wesley Longhofer, Francisco O Ramirez, Christine Min Wotipka and Kristopher Velasco (USA) published in International Sociology, Women’s participation and challenges to the liberal script: A global perspective. Read on to know more about the authors’ trajectory and work.

Julia C Lerch, Evan Schofer and David John Frank

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engage on that research?

Authors: The rising participation of women in public life – in the labor force, in education, and in politics – was one of the hallmark changes of the twentieth century. We started working on this topic because we saw rising participation slowing and even reversing in many countries in the early decades of the twenty-first century. We were struck by a worldwide wave of contestations over women’s participation, associated with broader challenges to the liberal paradigm. While not unprecedented, these challenges flattened the rising trajectory of women’s participation and in some regions flipped it. We set out to document and analyze the surging impediments to women’s participation and to broaden existing conversations about them by adding an explicitly global perspective on the pushback against women in the public sphere.