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.

Cheryl N. Collier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Windsor and a member of the university's cross-disciplinary Health Research Centre for the Study of Violence against Women.  Her primary areas of research include Canadian federal and provincial child care and anti-violence policy, comparative women's movements and gender, federalism and political parties.  Her present research examines the impact of federalism on sub-national child care advocacy in Canada and the United States.  She has also recently completed a research project examining shifting levels of feminist discourse inside of child care and anti-violence policy debates both federally and provincially in Canada.

Susan Franceschet is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Calgary. She joined the University of Calgary in 2006, after having been a member of the Political Science department at Acadia University for five years. Her research focuses on the impact of women in politics on public policy, gender quotas in comparative perspective, and women's substantive representation. She is currently a Fellow of the University of Calgary's Latin American Research Centre and a Fellow at the Institute for

Lenita Freidenvall is a Researcher in the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. Her research interests include women's political representation, gender quotas, candidate selection, political parties, citizenship, and women's movements. Her recent publications include (with Drude Dahlerup and Hege Skjeie) ‘The Nordic Countries: an Incremental Model' in Drude Dahlerup ed. Gender, Quotas and Politics. New York/London: Routledge, 2006

Joan is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Winnipeg where she teaches Canadian politics, women and politics and social movements/collective action. Joan holds a PhD in political science from McMaster University, a MPA from the joint program at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg and an Honours BA in political science from the University of Victoria.

Johanna Kantola is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She obtained her PhD from the University of Bristol where she also worked as an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She is the Co-Convenor of the ECPR Gender and Politics Standing Group. She's the author of Feminists Theorize the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and the editor of Changing State Feminism (with Joyce Outshoorn, Palgrave Macmillan 2007). She is currently working on a monograph titled Gender and the European Union (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan).

Joni Lovenduski is Anniversary Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is director of the Masters Course in Government Policy and Politics and the MPhil PhD Programme in Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, and a member of the Research Council of the European University Institute. She was Professor of Politics and head of Department at Southampton University from 1995 to 2000. She was Vice -Chair of the European Consortium for Political Research from 2000-2003.

Rianne Mahon holds the CIGI chair in comparative family and social policy at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo. Prior to that she was Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as well as Director of the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada.

Amy G. Mazur is the C.O. Johnson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Politcal Science at Washington State University. Her research and teaching interests focus on comparative feminist policy issues with a particular emphasis on France.  She is co editor of Political Research Quarterly.  Her books include: Comparative State Feminism (Sage, 1995) (editor with Dorothy McBride); Gender Bias and the State: Symbolic Reform at Work in Fifth Republic France (Pittsburgh University Press, 1995); State Feminism, Women's Movement, and Job Training: Making Democracies Work in the Global Economy (Routledge, 2001) (editor); Theorizing Feminist Policy (Oxford, 2002); and Politics, Gender and Concepts (editor with Gary Goertz, Cambridge University Press 2008); The French Fifth Republic at Fifty: Beyond Stereoytpes (editor with Sylvain Brouard and Andrew Appleton, Palgrave, 2008). 

Petra Meier is a lecturer at the Politics Department of Antwerp University. Her background and training cover the fields of political science, gender studies and social geography. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. From 2002-2006 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen.