Fiona Mackay is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests are in the broad areas of women and comparative politics, political representation, gender and public policy, and Scottish and British politics. She is an Associate Director of the Institute of Governance, also at Edinburgh, and was a Visiting Fellow at Auckland University in 2002. She has held research grants and consultancies with bodies including the Economic and Social Research Council, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Communities Scotland, and the Scottish Executive.

Mona Lena Krook is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Women and Gender Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. She received her B.A., M.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. Prior to this, she was an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Bristol (UK). In 2008-2009, she is a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a non-residential Fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. 

Louise is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Sydney where she teaches and researches in the areas of gender and political institutions, women's rights and comparative politics and policy. Her current research includes a project on the implementation of the gender provisions of the International Criminal Court as well as international collaborative research with other members of FIIN on Rethinking political institutions: integrating gender and neo-institutionalist perspectives. Along with Jill Vickers, Louise is also the co-director the Feminist International Network on State Architectures. In 2008 Louise was a visiting fellow in Political Science at Leiden University and in 2005 held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

Georgina Waylen is a Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. She was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, California; in 2003 she was a visiting fellow in the Department of Political Studies, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa; and in 2005 she was visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy, Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Meryl Kenny is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Politics and International Relations Department at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include feminist and new institutional theory, women and comparative politics, political representation, political recruitment, and Scottish politics. Her doctoral thesis was entitled ‘Gendering Institutions: The Political Recruitment of Women in Post-Devolution Scotland’, and used feminist and new institutional theory to explore the gendered dynamics of political recruitment in Scottish political parties.

Claire Annesley is Senior Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Manchester. She holds a BA in German and Politics from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a PhD from the University of Sheffield. Before joining the University of Manchester she was Research Assistant at the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at the University of Sheffield (1998-2000) and tutor on an EU-funded exchange programme between the University of Sheffield and the University of Lodz, Poland (1996-8).

Dr. Michelle Beyeler is currently a Lecturer at the Institut fuer Politikwissenschaft at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She studied political science and economics at the University of Bern, where she earned her doctorate in 2004. From 2003 to 2006 she was a researcher at the CIS and worked as an assistant lecturer at the Institute of Political Science, University of Zurich. From 2006, she was a visiting fellow at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES).

Viola Burau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus. The research interests of Viola Burau lie in the governance of expertise, comparative health policy and methods of cross-country comparison. She has analysed issues of medical governance in Britain and Germany as they occur in the policy formulation process (Burau 2001). She has also worked with the notion of ‘occupational governance' as part of a comparative study of the policies and politics of nursing (Burau, 1999a, b, 2005)

Caitríona Carter is Senior Lecturer at the Europa Institute, University of Edinburgh. Working within the discipline of social science, her research interests are in the broad areas of UK devolution and EU policy-making, domestic (state and regional) parliamentary adaptation to the EU, the transformation of UK-EU fisheries, and the political sociology of institutions. She has held research grants and consultancies with bodies including the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Scottish Executive and the Convention for Scottish Local Authorities.

Karen Celis is Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Administration and Public Management of the Hogeschool Gent since 2004. She studied Contemporary History at the Catholic University of Louvain before specialising in Women's Studies at the University of Antwerp. Her PhD in Political Science was on the political representation of women in the Belgian Lower house. She has published on the political representation of women, abortion, gender and socialism, and women and war.

Sarah Childs is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at Bristol University. Her research centres on the relationships between sex, gender and politics. It is concerned, both theoretically and empirically, with questions of women's descriptive, symbolic and substantive representation. She has written extensively on women's political representation since 1997, especially the feminization of British political parties, women's political recruitment to the House of Commons, the substantive representation of women, and women, politics and the media.