A persistent marker of women’s political inequality is the gender gap in heads of state, so how do women break this glass ceiling? Women’s Paths to Power asks two questions of interest to anyone studying the gender politics of executive office: (1) under what conditions are women likely to be appointed or elected president or prime minister and (2) what pathways do women take in their successful pursuit of these offices? Evren Wiltse and Lisa Hager construct a new data set for their multimethods approach to analyze three main pathways—family, activism, and political career—by which women have successfully pursued executive office. The book is a useful comparative study that adds important depth to understanding the dynamics of gender and executive political office.

The book unites two strands of literature: the pathways women use to achieve executive office and the institutional/political features that support women’s ascension to executive office. This unity allows the authors to present novel conclusions regarding the relationship between the personal and the institutional. The first half of the book uses qualitative analysis to build theoretical expectations explaining when women pursue familial, activist, or political careerist paths to executive office, joining historical analysis of 1960–2020 with descriptive s