Do Gender Differences in Home Sphere Demands affect Career and Influence Possibilities of German Parliamentarians?

This paper investigates mechanisms behind career and influence (in)equality among men and women in the German Parliament (Bundestag). The German Members of Parliament (MPs) is a particularly interesting political elite to study, as there is already a critical mass of women present in the parliament, though the gender regime setting of the country is relatively conservative. To collect the data required for this study, I conducted a survey on the entire German parliament. This paper employs a confirmative Structural Equation Model which was confirmed to fit the empirical data well, and shows that, though no general effects of gender were apparent, gender indirectly, through housework demands, affected career and influence as perceived by the MPs themselves (self-assessed).