Committee Assignments as Career Insurance: Gender and MP Retention When Parties Lose Seats

While extensive research examines how women enter political office, we know much less about how parties retain female legislators, particularly when facing electoral losses. We address this gap by examining whether women and men MPs face different career consequences when their party loses parliamentary seats, and whether committee assignments shape these outcomes. We argue that likely electoral losses force parties to make tough decisions about which MPs to keep on viable positions in candidate lists, and whom to let go. These decisions reveal parties’ underlying priorities about gender diversity and preferences for retaining policy expertise. Drawing on longitudinal data from Estonia (1999-2023), we track MPs and candidacies across seven electoral cycles, linking candidate list positions to parliamentary committee placements. We use the change in seats won between consecutive elections to identify periods of scarcity and abundance. Do parties exhibit gendered patterns in committee assignments? Do these assignments differentially protect male versus female MPs when candidate selection becomes competitive? Our findings reveal how committee service may either reproduce or challenge inequalities in political careers, with broader implications for understanding women’s continued political underrepresentation.