Comparative perspectives on gender equality in parliaments and the benefit of combining different approaches

Gender-sensitive parliaments have become an important international norm, and related studies developed much-needed guides, toolkits and (self-)assessment tools on how to ‘gender sensitise’ parliaments. They described ‘what is there’ and guided parliaments regarding their adoption and evaluation of rules and practices. How to use gender-sensitivity as an analytical tool to study parliaments and their gender equality efforts has received less attention. Changing the focus implies moving from studying gender-sensitivity as a political objective and policy tool to examining the conditions for, and effects of, gender-sensitive parliaments cross-nationally. We discuss the shape and necessity of such a shift in focus. We argue that a comparative analysis helps to understand and explain similarities and differences between parliaments. It overcomes summarizing and describing data, and instead engages in theory-building and -testing, systematic comparisons, and critical evaluations of rules and practices. Based on a systematic review of academic and policy papers on gender-sensitive parliaments, we systematize methodological approaches to the comparative study of gender-sensitive parliaments. Based on the systematization, we discuss potential methodological challenges and their solution, in particular: (1) case selection in cross-national research on gender-sensitive parliaments, (2) gaining access to parliaments and parliamentary administration, (3) going beyond ‘numbers’ and ‘counting’ approaches in gender-sensitive parliaments, (4) finding conceptualizations and operationalizations that work ‘with’ a parliament’s context (Childs & Palmieri 2023), (5) comparing dissimilar cases (e.g. democratic/non-democratic parliaments, national gender equality situation, …), and (6) measuring ‘effects’, impact’ and ‘success’ for a wide variety of initiatives.