Gender Quotas in the Post-Communist World

Book excerpt: This is a sourcebook on gender quotas in nations that experienced multiple generations of Communist Party rule. We built the book from a variety of sources and disciplines for use in research, teaching, and activism. We intend for the book to provide an introduction to gender quota policy and, thus, to the cross-national problem of women’s political inequality of voice. This book features the voice of the parliamentarians whose job it is to write, promote, and enforce the policies that help move society from gender inequality to gender equality. Nations with a Communist past have been underrepresented in the English-language scholarship on political representation and gender inequality. This sourcebook presents new and updated information about countries of the world whose women endure political inequality in everyday life yet whose specific plight over the last two decades has been little examined by Western scholars. Among other sources, this book includes, for the first time, an English language translation of the entire parliamentarian debate in Poland’s Sejm on the proposed gender quota law in 2010. This book was funded by the National Science Center, Poland (project number 2016/23 / B / HS6 / 03916).