Zedekia SidhaTaji ShivachiJustine Mokeira Magutu2026-07-062026-07-062023-03Sidha, Z., Shivachi, T., Magutu, J.M. (2023). How and Why Women Legislators Miss Out on Legislative Leadership Roles: Gender Equality Policies and Legislative Influence in Kenya. In: Onyango, G. (eds) State Politics and Public Policy in Eastern Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13490-6_13https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13490-6_13https://repository.ndu.ac.ke/handle/123456789/223Since the Beijing platform for action on women’s rights in 1995, many states and regional bodies have enacted laws to help implement the conference’s recommendations. Most of these laws are in the form of gender quotas. Arguably, 130 out of 156 states currently have one form of gender quota or the other. These quotas commonly exist in three central categories: reserved seats, party quotas and legislative quotas. This chapter dissects these categories to understand how they position women legislators—elected and nominated—for legislative leadership roles. It disassociates sex from gender quotas and compares access to legislative leadership positions between women and men and between elected and nominated local government assemblies in Kenya. We rely on Feminist Institutionalism (FI) lenses and rich empirical data to tease out the interstices between institutions, cultural structures and norms underpinning the exclusion of female legislators from legislative leadership positions. Our empirical analysis makes nuanced comparative inferences to other Eastern African states. Overall, we show that the art of nation-building in Africa, as elsewhere, is incomplete without effectively integrating women in key decision-making political institutions like the legislature.enArticle