Gretchen Bauer is a university professor with a specialization in African Politics and Women in Politics, and has traveled, studied and worked extensively in East and Southern Africa. During the early years of her career her research and scholarship focused on democratization and civil society organizations in southern Africa. During a 2002 sabbatical leave she was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research in Windhoek, Namibia and conducted extensive interviews with and research on women Members of Parliament in Namibia’s lower and upper houses. That research resulted in a 2004 Journal of Modern African Studies article on women in parliament in Namibia and a 2006 book, co-edited with Hannah Britton, Women in African Parliaments. She presented this work at the Women’s Worlds conferences in Uganda and South Korea. More recently She has examined the impact of choice of electoral system on women’s descriptive representation and the implications of different types of electoral gender quotas on women’s substantive representation in several east and southern African countries. This work is currently under review. Professor Bauer is currently Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware, in Newark, DE, USA.
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