The Head of the Class: Feminist Legislators, Women’s Representation, and Career Paths in Argentina

Activists and politicians frequently assume that elected women committed to gender equality will be stigmatized as feminists, devalued by their colleagues and punished by party leaders. Yet no studies systematically evaluate the careers of feminist legislators. This paper links research on legislators’ feminist activism to research on legislators’ political careers, asking two questions. First, who counts as a feminist legislator? Second, do feminist legislators have professional trajectories—operationalized as their posts before, during, and after congress—that indicate stigmatization or marginalization? Focusing on four cohorts of lower-house deputies in Argentina, we use bill authorship data and expert surveys to identify a group of “women-focused” legislators. We divide this group into those who champion feminist causes nearly exclusively (defined as supporting policies that challenge religious values), and those who adopt a gendered, but not necessarily feminist, perspective (defined as supporting policies that help women fulfill their traditional gender roles). We then compare the trajectories of our male and female “feminist champions” and our male and female “gender supporters” to the trajectories of the “average” male and female legislators. Counter to expectations, we find no meaningful differences in the post-congress careers of feminist champions. Any sex differences that do exist between female and male legislators active on women’s issues mirror those found between female and male politicians in Argentina generally. Moreover, many feminist champions held high-profile leadership positions during their terms: this high level of political capital may explain their issue advocacy in the first place. Yet this political capital results neither in punishment nor reward: female legislators, whether feminist champions or gender supporters, do not receive high prestige post-congress appointments, but neither do they disappear from public life. Representing women does not disproportionately risk women’s political careers.