Researchers, organizations, and activists advocate increased political representation for both women and minority groups. But looking around the world, we know little about how politics at the intersection of these identities impacts the legislative representation of minority women. In this dissertation I collect data on the political representation of men and women from 461 racial, ethnic, and religious groups in 81 democratic and semi-democratic countries around the world. For each of the countries in my sample, I researched majority/minority dynamics and selected social groups that reflect the most salient divisions or social cleavages in each context. The data I collect indicate that minority women are underrepresented in politics to a greater degree than both their male minority and majority female counterparts.
I also move beyond descriptive analysis to conduct the first large-scale, cross-national investigation of the factors that explain minority women's political representation across different cultural, structural, and political contexts. Using hierarchical linear modeling, I predict variation in absolute and relative measures of minority women's representation. I test the effects of traditional variables employed in women in politics models as well as new measures expected to influence the legislative success of racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups across countries. I consider how gender and minority quotas, both as single policies and in combination, affect the composition of national legislatures. And, in the final empirical analyses, I investigate the political representation of Muslim women both in the West and around the World. Throughout the dissertation, I supplement quantitative models with brief illustrative case studies of Lebanon, Romania, Burundi, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Overall, I find that minority women face substantial barriers to political representation. In many countries in the world, both majority women and minority men are successful at gaining seats in national legislatures, but minority women are not. But, this dissertation also illustrates that minority women's dual identities sometimes advantage them relative to their minority male or majority female peers. Future research should consider not only how to empower women and minorities, but also how to advance the political representation of individuals at the intersection of these social categories.