Parenthood and Politics: Gendered Career Pathways in the Bundestag

Gender and politics scholars have revealed significant differences between women and men’s parliamentary careers, differences often attributed to gender roles that place greater caretaking burdens on women. While gendered patterns of caretaking are nearly universal, with women spending more time on household and reproductive tasks than men, public policies that help individuals reconcile work and parenting vary widely, as do the rules, practices, and norms that govern the ability to reconcile parliamentary and home life. Despite the importance of reconciliation policies and parliamentary accommodations for motherhood, we lack systematic knowledge about how gender roles, reconciliation policies, and political institutions work together to mitigate gender gaps in parliamentary careers. This paper makes two contributions to our knowledge about the salience of parenthood for political career pathways in the German Parliament, using an original dataset of biographical details for German MPs across seven legislative terms (elected 1994-2017). First, we document that while women and men legislators in Germany have children at roughly similar rates, fathers consistently have more children than mothers. Second, we trace the gendered effects of parenthood and number of children on career advancement, in terms of successful re-election, appointment to committee leadership positions, and appointment to cabinet ministries.