Studies of Western parliaments find women experience greater difficulty than men in combining parenting with a career in parliament. Is it the same worldwide? Addressing this issue, we compared the marital and parental status of legislators in 25 diverse parliaments around the world while theoretically exploring whether parliamentary family gaps are due to individual, family, institutional, societal or global-level conditions. Through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we find institutional- and societal-level factors matter. Namely, family gaps between men and women members of parliament (MPs) were narrower under conditions of higher female employment, women in parliamentary leadership and lower rates of child mortality. Thus, motherhood penalties for women MPs are likely to diminish with increases in women’s paid employment, better social welfare provisions and more women in parliamentary leadership positions. Our findings also point to the importance of public policies, parliamentary rules and critical actors in reducing time demands on parents who are MPs.

Cross-national studies of women's political leadership (WPL) usually focus on female prime ministers and presidents or numbers of women in parliament. While illuminating, these studies fail to provide a comprehensive assessment of WPL in a particular place and time. Addressing this gap in the literature, we assert that WPL is inherently contingent upon the theoretical concepts of “structural power” and “male dominance,” encompassing multiple formal apex political decision-making institutions. In accordance with this perspective, we have constructed a novel women's political leadership index based on collective leadership across judicial (high court judges), executive (cabinet ministers), and legislative (parliamentary committee chairs) branches of governments to capture both thepresenceof women among political leaders and theirbalanceacross institutions. Applying our index to 21 diverse territories in Asia, we demonstrate the utility of our approach through a series of country case studies illustrating four prominent patterns of WPL: exclusion, illusion, imbalance, and balance. We conclude by discussing the potential benefits of globally expanding the scope of the index.

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Humanitarian visas provide one of few potential pathways to citizenship for foreign nationals victimized within the United States and are an important aspect of immigration law. Yet one form of humanitarian visas—T nonimmigrant status (T visa)—has received scant attention in the socio-legal studies literature. “T visas” were designed to aid survivors of human trafficking and, though the US government estimates that tens of thousands of individuals are trafficked in the United States every year, only 15 percent of the five thousand T visas available annually have been granted since the program’s inception in 2002. Why are T visas such an underutilized form of immigration relief? Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with immigration lawyers, law enforcement personnel, and non-governmental organization service providers routinely involved in T visa applications, we find that the low rate of applications and approvals is driven by a combination of structural barriers and expansive discretion of key actors in the legal process to interpret and apply the law, which results in a narrow and often misinformed construction of victimhood. We add to the literature on the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats to shape the law and determine how it is applied with considerable consequences for survivors of trafficking.