“We See What Men Don’t See”: Reflections of Women Cabinet Ministers from The Gambia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone

Abstract: This article focuses on women in appointed political office in three West African countries—The Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone—in the aftermath of dictatorship or civil war and in a region that has trailed others in Africa in women’s representation in political office. Through a set of semistructured interviews with former women cabinet ministers from across political parties and post-transition administrations and including other qualitative data sources and the secondary literature, it investigates women cabinet ministers’ paths to power, attitudes to gender parity, perceptions of representation impacts, and experiences of cabinet reshuffles. It argues that in each of these areas, women’s experiences can nuance our understanding of what being a woman cabinet minister today means and can suggest important questions for future research. Some of its findings include a broader understanding of what it means to hail from or belong to a political family, women cabinet ministers’ concerns for achieving gender parity in their own ministries, their perceptions of their representation impacts in nonlegislative ways and as role models, and a lingering question about whether women ministers are reshuffled or dismissed more than men.