Context is key? Determinants of gendered patterns in the substantive focus of female MPs’ parliamentary work

Despite the improving descriptive representation of women in contemporary parliaments, gendered inequalities between male and female MPs, in terms of their status, role and position in the legislature, still prevail. Focusing specifically on parliamentary behaviour, research for instance shows that women MPs get to take the floor less often than their male counterparts, and especially during ‘hard-policy’ debates, covering topics that are commonly linked to men’s stereotypic strengths and interests (e.g. Bäck & Debus, 2019, de Vet & Devroe, 2020). Although we already know that this different substantive focus of MPs’ work is not only driven by their personal preferences and interests, among others because such differences enlarge when also parties’ gatekeeping role increases (de Vet & Devroe, 2020), much remains unknown about which contextual factors influence such gendered differences. Using a novel and extensive dataset on the content of MPs’ parliamentary questions (N=180,783) between 1995 and 2019 in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives, this paper examines which factors cause women MPs to focus more or less on soft- or hard-policy topics. Building on critical mass, party gatekeeping and role model theories, we hypothesize that female MPs are more likely to break down traditional gendered patterns when they are part of parliamentary party groups with a larger number of female MPs, with a female party group leader or when female ministers are appointed to hard-policy departments. As such, this papers provides important new insights into the factors that may enlarge or reduce gendered inequalities in parliament.