Gender penalties in political representation: intersectional perspectives

Abstract

Research on women's political representation and leadership shows that women have increasingly gained access to political office. However, they still face additional hurdles compared to men, for example in securing leadership positions and powerful roles in legislatures. Gender stereotypes impact on how political opportunities and rewards are distributed among politicians, whether by political parties or by voters, and gendered organisational cultures and ideologies within political institutions still reproduce an unequal playing field. This panel seeks to collect papers that focus on gender penalties - the set of negative effects that gender has on political participation - and how these play a role in political recruitment and representation. The panel also seeks to advance research on gender penalties from an intersectional perspective, seeking papers that consider how gender and other politically marginalised social identities interact in producing or undermining political inequalities. Indeed, how the intersections of multiple politically marginalised identities result in penalties and biases remains to be explored in depth. The panel seeks contributions that explore a) How gender and other social identities affect politicians' self-perception; b) How gender and other social identities affect how politicians are perceived in their representative role or how they can act in legislative bodies; c) How gender stereotypes influence voters' preferences for politicians; d) How gender stereotypes interact with other expectations in influencing voters' preferences for politicians. The panel welcomes papers that engage in a dialogue with the above topics, using both qualitative and quantitative research designs; we also welcome theoretical contributions that innovate on how “gender as a social structure” frameworks (Risman 1998) can be used to study political participation and representation.

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