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 amongst others 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 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 to empirically bringing to light the gendered character of the institution and its repercussions for retention. The research uncovers the role of the municipality as a gendered workplace as barrier to equal participation that differs between men and women in impactful ways.