The leaking pipeline of politics: Understanding gendered dropout of politicians

Women are slowly but surely entering politics, both to elect and to be elected. More recently however, numbers of their presence in parliaments have been stagnating. One explanation for that is that women politicians are dropping out of politics more and earlier than their male counterparts. The result is that the number of women does not go up, despite improved influx, skewing equality and affecting the political pipeline. This article adds a piece to the puzzle of the underrepresentation of women in politics by showing how and why women drop out of politics. I ask: how do the different lived experiences of men and women in politics explain female drop-out? Dropping out of the political pipeline may happen during a politicians’ term, deciding not to run again after one’s term ended, or not being elected again. Previous research has shown there are gendered patterns in each of these. Amongst others, women politicians drop out more often and have shorter political careers. In the paper, first, I make an original theoretical contribution to our understanding of legislative recruitment by adding ‘retention’ and ‘drop out’ to the process. Second, by means of 15 semi-structured interviews with local Dutch politicians that dropped out, I provide thick empirical explanations to show why this is the case and what pushes and pulls are at play, using a Gendered Workplace Approach (a feminist institutionalist approach) to empirically bringing to light the gendered character of an (political in this case, or otherwise) institution. The metaphor of the ‘leaking pipeline’ is the most compelling way in which this process of in- and exclusion in politics has been described. Indeed the pipeline of political careers is leaving people behind (leaking) throughout time (horizontal) and hierarchies (vertical); thus resulting in relatively low numbers of politicians from disadvantaged groups present in our parliaments. Moreover, dropout on the local level affects the political pipeline in important ways on other levels of politics when it comes to gender equality. The local level, a parttime function, is often perceived as an approachable point of entry for a further political career. The legislative recruitment process has been theorized to comprise ‘eligibles’, ‘aspirants’, ‘candidates’ and ‘Members of Parliament’, but has stopped there. Certainly, empirical work has followed on the difficult circumstances under which women politicians, once in office, (have to) do their work. Such work includes identifying gendered dynamics once in office, scrutinizing parliaments as ‘gendered workplaces’. In this paper, I use semi-structured interviews with politicians that dropped out early to unpack how dropout from politics comes about and what role the gendered workplace plays. I have special attention for the role of local parties as well as local chapters of national parties in this process. The research shows the important role of the municipality as a gendered workplace as barrier to equal participation that differs between men and women in impactful ways. Continuous exposure to these leads to attrition; layered challenges eventually leading to dropout.