Parliamentary Politics Polarize around Gender: The Case of European Parliament

This paper advances these key gender and politics debates by focusing on parliamentary political parties. Its first contribution is to build a framework of analyzing parliamentary parties by combining the focus on gendered inequalities within the political parties with their gender equality measures and practices. Drawing on extant literature the proposed paper develops a model of a continuum of “gendered inequalities” ranging from discrimination, harassment to more subtle issues and indirect inequalities. This dimension is compared and contrasted with a another one: that of “gender equality practices”, also presented as a continuum ranging from soft to hard measures. A focus on parliamentary political parties enables an analysis of politicization and politics around gender equality and their impact on gendered political work within parliaments. To illustrate the benefits of this, the proposed paper analyses the case of the European Parliament. The European Parliament makes it possible to study a wide range of political parties and political groups which each have very different approaches to gender, equalities and women’s rights. Currently, the European Union’s 27 member states’ political parties have formed seven political groups within the parliament: including the conservative, social democrat and liberal groups respectively, the Greens/EFA and far left, as well as, most recently, the radical right populist groups. This gives an exciting and unique coverage of European political parties, their distinct gender regimes and approaches to gender and equality and gives an opportunity to study the interaction between the gendered inequalities and gender equality practices and their significance in parliamentary contexts. The proposed paper will draw on a large qualitative dataset of 130 interviews with Members of the European Parliament and political staff conducted in 2018-2021. The interviews cover all political groups, and form a representative sample of countries and genders. The findings place the political groups along a continuum of the axes of gendered inequalities and gender equality practices, comparing and contrasting their effects. The analysis shows a group of excellent performers (greens, far left), which set high standards for gender equalities within the parliament; good performers (social democrats, liberals), which illustrate good intentions but persistent gendered inequalities; contradictory performers (conservative, right populist) and poor performers (far right), which respectively explain why gender equality fails to be achieved in the parliament, and has, instead turned into a polarizing issue.