Mona Lena Krook is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Women & Politics Ph.D. Program at Rutgers University. She has published widely on all aspects of gender and political representation. Her first book, Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Reform Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2009), won the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Victoria Schuck Award in 2010 for the best book on women and politics. In 2019, it was honored with a George H. Hallett Award from the Representation and Electoral Systems Section, recognizing a book published at least 10 years ago that has made a lasting contribution to the literature on representation and electoral systems. Her second book, Violence against Women in Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020), explores rising attacks against women in public life around the globe and received the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

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Throughout her career, Krook has worked closely with global democracy practitioners to advance women's political participation, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations Development Programme, and UN Women. She partnered with the National Democratic Institute to develop the #NotTheCost campaign to stop violence against women in politics, which was launched in 2016 by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. This campaign reached the floor of the U.S. Congress in 2020 with a House Resolution authored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, together with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Jackie Speier. In 2023-2024, Krook worked with the Committee for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to draft General Recommendation No. 40 on the equal and inclusive representation of women in decision-making. 

 

For her work on the #NotTheCost campaign, Krook received the 2021 APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement, honoring significant civic or community engagement activity by a political scientist. She was also recognized with a Chancellor’s Award for Global Impacts from Rutgers University. In 2025, her collected contributions received the APSA Charles E. Merriam Award, honoring an individual whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research. Her latest collaboration, Gender, Women, and Democracy Resources, involves creating a shared repository of knowledge on advancing gender-inclusive democracy, recovering and posting tools and publications on these topics that have been -- or are at risk of being -- removed from government and institutional websites.