Across the world cabinet ministers are significant political players and yet they are grossly under researched, in part because of a dearth of consistent and comparable data. Appointed and not elected, cabinet ministers’ access to office is typically ‘the prerogative’ of the executive and a group of close advisers. For cabinet ministers, the appointment likely represents a career pinnacle, significant policy making powers and the opportunity for substantive and symbolic representation impacts. While women are vastly underrepresented as cabinet ministers, there is a growing global trend toward gender parity in cabinets. Through a set of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with former women cabinet ministers from across political parties and post-transition administrations and relying on other qualitative data sources such as memoirs, social media posts, news reports and the secondary literature, this research elaborates the contributions of women cabinet ministers to politics in five West African countries. The research investigates women cabinet ministers’ ‘paths to power,’ interactions with women’s movements, attitudes toward gender parity, perceptions of representation impacts, and experiences of cabinet shuffles. To date, this research from West Africa – which contributes to a book manuscript in progress – helps to nuance our understanding of women cabinet ministers globally.
