What Type of Equality are we Talking About when we Speak of Gender Sensitive Parliaments?

Recently, the term ‘gender sensitive parliament’ became a buzzword, both in research and among practitioners. While there seems to be a common understanding of what a gender sensitive parliament stands for, this paper argues that the theoretical underpinnings of the concept are less clear. The paper addresses this issue by investigating the current understanding(s) of the concept of a gender sensitive parliament through a literature study. Most of the existing literature is aware of the complexity of defining a gender sensitive parliament. In many cases, the literature provides concrete cases of countries and their under representation of women's interest, and points out concrete obstacles of equality. By doing so, the literature describes how a parliament is gendered, which is to be read as ‘contains a gender bias’. Most of the literature does not explicitly define the concept of a gender sensitive parliament, but provides for negative definitions by pointing out how the parliament under study is gendered, thereby implicitly defining the concept. This trend in the literature is different from Lena Wängnerud’s seminal work on the principles of gender sensitive parliament (2015, Routledge), which sets out a positive, explicit, definition of what is to be understood by a gender sensitive parliament. Starting from this overview of how the literature defines a gender sensitive parliament, the second part of the paper investigates the underlying understanding of gender equality. It questions which definition of gender and of equality (be they implicit) underlie the different understandings of a gender sensitive parliament, and to what extent they contain an opening towards gender+. The main theoretical question this paper aims to answer is what understanding of gender equality underpins the concept of a gender sensitive parliament prevailing in the current gender and politics literature.