https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506820929222 European Journal of Women’s Studies 2020, Vol. 27(3) 285–292 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1350506820929222 journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw EJWS What’s gender got to do with populism? Alessia Donà University of Trento, Italy Abstract While populism has accumulated an extensive research, its gender dimension has remained largely understudied. Only recently has a literature emerged that focuses on the gender dimension of radical right populist parties in Europe, where they have risen from marginal to government positions. In this article, I provide a guide to the topics and results of this recent development and delineate future research lines. In doing so, I will illustrate the relevance of adopting a gender perspective in studying the phenomenon of populism. Keywords Europe, gender, populism, radical right parties Introduction Academic research on populism has been growing in recent years, in the wake of a new wave of political actors whose ideology ‘considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonist camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”’ (Mudde, 2004: 543). Unsurprisingly, ‘populism’ was the Cambridge Dictionary’s 2017 word of the year, given its common use by journalists and the general public alike. The contemporary political scenario, therefore, features the diffusion of a globally spreading populist trend (De la Torre, 2018), even though the populist phenomenon emerged many years ago (Canovan, 1981) and became a consolidated field of research in political sci- ence (for a state of the art review, see Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017). Despite new insights and deeper understanding of populism, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013: 508) observed that ‘so far the relationship between populism and gender has received little academic attention’ (an assertion later confirmed by Abi-Hassan, 2017). Recent research developments have the potential to alter this observation, just as their findings are becom- ing broadly accepted. This article presents a brief overview of the contributions of Corresponding author: Alessia Donà, University of Trento, Department of Sociology and Social Research, Centre for Gender Studies, Via Verdi 26, Trento, 38122, Italy. Email: Alessia.dona@unitn.it 929222EJW 0 0 10.1177/1350506820929222European Journal of Women’s StudiesDonà research-article 2020 Open Forum 2 2 2 22 EJW EJW 1 10 0. 0.1 117 17 7 77/ 7/13 3 1350 0 050 50 068 82 2 209 9 92 29 9222 uropean Journal of Wome uropean Journal of Wome n’s Studies n’s Studies Eu Eu Donà