Treated equally or still facing masculine privilege? Parliamentary questioning of women (and men) ministers in a gender balanced context

Negative treatment of women political leaders is often associated with men’s dominance and male norms in political institutions. While conditions are presumed to become more gender equal in numerically gender-balanced contexts, knowledge of the conditions for women political leaders in such contexts is scarce. Does masculine privilege remain, or are women leaders treated on par with men? In this study, we turn to the Swedish case to explore how cabinet members are treated by MPs, and whether women are treated more negatively. Sweden has had gender-balanced parliaments and cabinets since the 1990s, which provides good opportunities for evaluating whether a gender-balanced context provides gender-equal opportunities for political leadership. Empirically, we focus on parliamentary questioning and subsequent debates, which are often relatively informal and spontaneous interactions compared to the highly structured and prepared debates on bills and motions. As such, they provide an opportunity to capture how informal (gendered) expectations and attitudes can affect the treatment of political leaders in practice. We use quantitative textual analysis of parliamentary debates from 1990-2022 to analyze to what extent questions posed to women and men cabinet members follow different patterns. For example, we analyze whether women cabinet members face more questions from the opposition, fewer boosting questions from members of government parties, and whether the tone of questions differs. Furthermore, we investigate whether and how women and men MPs treat women and men executives differently. This allows us to enhance our understanding of to what extent the gender composition of parliaments contributes to different opportunity structures for women executives.