Gender Power, Leadership, and Governance traverses U.S. politics as it develops the concept of gender power and questions why the ideological dimensions of masculinity - masculinism - have seldom been recognized. It finds gender power in startling places and offers revealing insights about the pervasive and reinforcing effects of masculinism. The book is organized around the idea that gender is an analytic category distinctive from sex, a property of institutions, and has symbolic meaning.

While this idea has been explored in other disciplines, the application of it to the field of political science yields theoretically rich understandings of power and leadership and new perspectives on the stubborn obstacles women confront.

The book crosses subfields of study in political science by mixing theory with empirical research, including cases from legislative, executive, and electoral politics. Policy, bureaucracy, symbolic politics, and institutional structures all come under scrutiny. It will be of interest to scholars of political science and women's studies, students and theorists of leadership or management, and anyone who wishes to explore the complex relationship between gender and politics.