The Intersection of Gender and Minority Status in National Legislatures: The Minority Women Legislative Index

To date, we are unaware to what extent gains in women's legislative representation have reached minority women. To facilitate cross‐national research on minority women in politics, I present and explore new cross‐national data on the election of women and men from 431 ethnic, racial, and religious groups to national legislatures in 81 countries between 2005 and 2007. I create a new measure scoring countries by minority women's representation relative to their share of the population—the Minority Women Legislative Index ( MWLI ). Descriptive analyses show minority women to be substantially underrepresented in national legislatures overall but their level of exclusion varies geographically.