When Age Intersects with Gender. The Marginalization of Young Female Legislators in the Swedish Parliament

Previous research of legislatures from a gender perspective shows that the relationship between legislators’ sex and their performance is mediated by other factors and therefore more complex than it might seem at a first glance. While for example seniority and the impact of gender quotas have been given a lot of attendance in the literature, a less analysed aspect is how legislators’ sex intersects with their age. The aim of this paper is to analyse how sex and age influence legislators’ opportunities to carry out their representative tasks on equal grounds using original survey data from the Swedish Parliament collected in 2016 in combination with 40 in-depth interviews with young male and female MPs. The Swedish Parliament is one of few countries in the world that has been descriptively equal for a long period of time. While our survey data indeed shows that the legislature is gender equal also with regards to many of the informal aspects governing its inner life, young female legislators below the age of 35 stand out as being more exposed to negative treatment within the Parliament and experiencing more pressure and anxiety compared to other groups, whereas young male legislators comes out as the least exposed group. Contrary to previous findings this effect cannot primarily be explained by their newness in the Parliament. Through interview data with a majority of the young Swedish legislators, we seek to understand how sex and age intersects in either constraining or enabling MPs in their parliamentary work.