Pamela Paxton is Associate Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Ohio State University. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in Economics and Sociology and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is affiliated with the Mershon Center for International Security, the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy, and has consulted for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She is the author of numerous scholarly articles on women in politics focused on statistical models of women's parliamentary representation. Her research has appeared in a variety of journals, including the… American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Comparative Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Studies in International Comparative Development. Her current work investigates women's inclusion into parliamentary bodies in over 150 countries from 1893 to 2003. She lives with her husband, Paul von Hippel, in Columbus, Ohio.
Melanie M. Hughes is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Ohio State University. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 2001 with a degree in Sociology and Government. After coming to Ohio State in 2002, she wrote a masterrsquo;s thesis investigating new explanations for womenrsquo;s parliamentary representation in developing countries. She has also researched the lasting impact of colonialism on womenrsquo;s parliamentary representation. She has won multiple university awards, has presented her work on women in politics at several conferences, and has a number of articles forthcoming in journals such as American Sociological Review and the Annual… Review of Sociology. Currently, she is working on her dissertation, which looks at intersectionality through the representation of minority women in national legislatures around the world.