Women’s rights as a career strategy: the political trajectories of the members of the Women’s Rights Delegation in the French National Assembly

In the French National Assembly, being appointed to the Women’s Rights Delegation is not something many MPs ambition to do. The Delegation holds little legislative or oversight power, benefits from very little media coverage and lacks resources as few other parliamentary bodies. Based on interviews with former members and a trajectory analysis of all MPs who were appointed to this Delegation since it was created, this paper aims at analysing the effects such appointments have on parliamentary careers, and most specifically on women’s careers. We will show that party groups across the political spectrum tend to massively appoint female backbenchers to the Delegation, even when they express no interest in participating in its activities, as they tend to be considered “natural experts” of such topics. These unwanted nominations sometimes transform into a feminist “awakening”, leading some previously uninterested female MPs to specialise and embrace women’s representation as a gateway to more promising career opportunities, as they promptly accumulate new parliamentary and extra-parliamentary responsibilities. We will therefore argue that in this case, specialisation does not occur by choice, but constitutes a necessary adaptation for these female backbenchers to raise their status and differentiate inside their own party groups, in a context of constrictive institutional expectations of gender roles.