The study of women in politics is a burgeoning field of research. Scholars have examined women's political participation, disparities in their electoral representation and the institutional, social and economic factors that influence their presence in politics. While this literature is rich, much of it tends to examine a single level of government, providing only a partial understanding of women in politics. When researchers have looked at electoral presence across jurisdictions, the dominant conclusion is that women will find greater electoral success municipally than at the federal, provincial or territorial levels~Blais and Gidengil!.Although the idea of a municipal advantage has achieved remarkable academic currency, the empirical evidence has been rather mixed and muted. Using a comprehensive dataset, this article sheds new light on women's electoral presence over time and across the three levels of government in Canada. Following a review of the relevant literature, the article presents several new findings on the presence of women at the three levels of government. It challenges the notion of a municipal advantage and argues that women experience nearly equivalent levels of underrepresentation at all three levels of government.

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Gender gaps in voter turnout and electoral representation have narrowed, but other forms of gender inequality remain. We examine gendered differences in donations: who donates and to whom? Donations furnish campaigns with necessary resources, provide voters with cues about candidate viability, and influence which issues politicians prioritize. We exploit an administrative data set to analyze donations to Canadian parties and candidates over a 25-year period. We use an automated classifier to estimate donor gender and then link these data to candidate and party characteristics. Importantly, and in contrast to null effects from research on gender affinity voting, we find women are more likely to donate to women candidates, but women donate less often and in smaller amounts than men. The lack of formal gendered donor networks and the reliance on more informal, male-dominated local connections may influence women donors’ behavior. Change over a quarter century has been modest, and large gender gaps persist.

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The annual conference of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) is a disciplinary bellwether that helps us trace the evolution of political science scholarship. This article analyzes research presented at the conference between 1965 and 2015. It shows growth in the gender and politics sub-field and in the presence of women in leadership positions in the CPSA. At the same time, gender-related research is often presented in gender-focused panels and not incorporated across the discipline's sub-fields. This means that gender scholars typically present their work to like-minded researchers, and scholars in other sub-fields have little exposure to gender perspectives. That such siloing occurs at the earliest stages of research dissemination is an important contextual factor in understanding gendered citation patterns, departmental hiring and rates of tenure and promotion. For Canadian political science to remain relevant, more needs to be done to incorporate gender perspectives across the discipline's sub-fields.