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Gender-equal governments, which include the same number of men and women as ministry heads and in other cabinet posts, used to be the purview of  and highly progressive societies like Canada and .

No longer.

Mexico’s president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office in December, has  that women will hold  in his 16-member cabinet, including the powerful secretary of the interior position.

And Spain’s new prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, recently became the first world leader  of cabinet positions. No country in the world has a higher proportion of female-led ministries. Thirty years ago, Spain had .

Women hold just 20 per cent of cabinet positions in the United States and 28 percent in the United Kingdom. Worldwide, the average is .

As   who study , we believe the quick, steady rise of women to power in Spain embodies a trend we have observed worldwide: Once more women , their numbers tend only to rise.

We call this the “concrete floor” for women’s political representation. For a democratic government to have  these days, – that is, for the general public to have faith in its decisions – it must include women.

Gains beget gains

Women’s representation doesn’t necessarily go up with each new administration.

But in studying the composition of initial governing cabinets – those formed right after an election – in Spain, France, Australia, the United States, Canada, Chile and the United Kingdom from 1929 to 2016, we found that women’s presence did rise cumulatively, over time and across party lines, in these countries.

After a 40-year dictatorship led by General Francisco Franco, democracy returned to Spain in 1977. But it would take more than a decade for women to be included in Spain’s newly democratic government. Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez didn’t appoint women to an initial cabinet until his third electoral win in 1989, when he .

The next administration, led by conservative prime minister José María Aznar, raised the total with four  in his 14-member cabinet.

Spain’s historic breakthrough came in 2004, when Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, , named the country’s first gender-equal cabinet: .

Now 11 of Spain’s 17 ministers are women, including – for the first time in Spain’s history – the position of finance minister.

France’s recent history looks similar.

President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed seven women to his 15-member cabinet in 2007. His successor, Socialist , had 17 women in his 34-member cabinet. Cabinet size in most countries varies from administration to administration.

On the campaign trail in 2016, President  promised to have equal representation. Today, his cabinet contains 11 women and 11 men.

Voters like gender-inclusive governments

Our research shows that when leaders use their powers of appointment to , they are never punished electorally and are often  globally for doing so.

Just a few years ago Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was celebrated around the world for assembling a gender-equal cabinet. His reasoning? “,” he told reporters.

Leaders who appoint significantly fewer women than their predecessors, on the other hand, risk heavy criticism from the media and political opponents. That can weaken their support among voters.

When Australian prime minister Tony Abbott appointed  to his cabinet in 2013, he had to justify his “embarassing” decision to voters, the opposition party and the press. His predecessor’s government had included three female cabinet members.

Malcolm Turnbull replaced Abbott two years later and quickly appointed  to his governing team.

Each gender-equal cabinet appears to create expectations of similar or greater women’s inclusion in the next.

The ‘concrete floor’

We did find several instances where leaders appointed fewer women than their predecessors. However, the decline is generally minimal.

In Chile’s first post-dictatorship government, elected in 1990, President Patricio Aylwin apointed  of cabinet posts.

Chile’s first female president, Socialist Michelle Bachelet, had a  in 2006. Four years later, her conservative successor, Sebastián Piñera, appointed . While his government was not gender-equal, women were significantly better represented than they had been before Bachelet’s administration.

We call this phenomenon the “concrete floor.” It is the minimal threshold of women’s inclusion for people to see a leader’s cabinet as democratically legitimate.

And unlike the “glass ceiling,” that subtle,  that has kept women out of powerful positions, the concrete floor ensuring their inclusion in government is visible to – and recognized by – all the leaders we studied.

Gender diversity is the only guarantee

A similar standard applies to certain  in the some, but not all, of the countries we studied.

In Canada, Germany and Spain, for example, cabinets must be geographically representative. Like those countries, the United States also has a federal system of government, but American presidents are not expected to ensure that cabinet posts go to people from different states or regions.

In Canada and the United States, all-white cabinets are now virtually unthinkable. President Lyndon Johnson appointed United States’ first  – Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert C. Weaver – in 1966. became Canada’s first-ever black minister in 1979.

Meanwhile, cabinets in  and Spain – both increasingly diverse countries – remain entirely white. The lone , Rita Bosaho, wasn’t elected until 2015. No racial minority has ever held a Spanish cabinet position.

Gender was the only required representational criterion that appeared across all seven countries we studied, where  for a quarter-century.

Women make up half the world’s population. Now, increasingly and evidently irreversibly, democratic governments are starting to show it.