Progress towards gender equality in politics is striking. With the help of electoral gender quotas in 130+ countries, women’s national legislative representation more than doubled in the last 20 years. Other historically marginalized groups – racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples – are also increasingly making their way into our parliaments. Political institutions are, then, more inclusive today than they have ever been. Yet, equal representation has not been fully realized: some marginalized groups have seen a decline, and men from dominant social and economic groups – hereafter ‘elite men’ – remain numerically dominant. Indeed, as of January 2014, there were no known countries where elite men did not hold a disproportionately high share of positions in national elective office (Hughes 2015)
