Caught between their female gender and their aspirations in a public sphere founded on the gender role of men, women face a problem that is more intractable than conventional feminist political analysis has fully recognized. In this book, Jennifer Chapman addresses both the substance of the problem and feminist strategies for change.
Male dominance of political elites is virtually universal and yet there is no general theory of recruitment to account for this. Jennifer Chapman uses a rigorous comparative study of political recruitment to show why different models of the process among men produce near-identical results, irrespective of context. She then looks beyond this general pattern to its gender basis, and to strategies for change.