UC Irvine

Recent history has seen a large degree of worldwide activity surrounding the category of women and women’s incorporation into social institutions, such as education and government. International organizing around the category of women continues to flourish in the form of women’s international non-governmental organizations (WINGOs). Alongside this increasing international civil society activity, the period since 1960 has seen increasing foci on gender equality and empowerment as ideological goals informing mechanisms of national development around the world.

In this dissertation, I bring together findings from research in social movements, political sociology, international relations, and cultural sociology in arguing a neo-institutional approach to the following questions: how has the structure and discourse of women’s global civil society evolved over time, what is the effect of women’s global civil society on the structural expansion of governments to include women globally, and what influence do women’s global civil society and structural expansion in government have on women’s institutional power outcomes cross-nationally? Based on world society theory, I argue that world society is a locus of messages regarding women which are diffused to nation-states through linkages to international organizations. Furthermore, both women’s empowerment and national institutional incorporation are cultural constructions from world culture that diffuse to nation-states through international organizations and have increasingly come to define legitimacy of nation-states, leading to expansion in social concerns of the state to include women.

Chapter 1 traces WINGO structure and discourse across time as demonstrated in analyses on increases in WINGO foundation over the period since 1888, increases in national WINGO memberships since 1965, and an exploratory factor analysis of sixteen non-mutually exclusive WINGO categories (UIA 1960-2014). Chapter 2 analyzes expansion in state structure towards women, supporting a world society argument through empirical tests employing event history regression methods to explain rate of women’s ministry establishment as a function of linkage to WINGOs and United Nations-designated Least Developed Country status. Finally, Chapter 3 analyzes the effects of world society and national government structural expansion to include women on women’s institutional power outcomes cross-nationally since 1960, considering women’s labor force participation, women’s tertiary education enrollment, and women’s parliamentary representation.