Theme 1: Entering and exiting politics

One theme to be explored in the roundtable is how gender and other identities condition who enters politics, but also who leaves. Building on their respective chapters, Louise K. Davidson Schmich and Zahra Runderkamp engage in a discussion. Davidson-Schmich draws on gender party research to interrogate the relationship between gender and political ambition, pointing to the ways in which parties shape what having and expressing political ambition means, with gendered consequences. Runderkamp turns the question around to ask when, why and how women leave. Bringing together insights from FI and gendered workplace approaches, she advances a theoretical framework for studying gendered patterns of drop-out, disentangling the contextual dynamics of the ‘leaky pipeline’ of politics.