Men continue to dominate national parliaments numerically across nearly all democracies, but this over-representation does not necessarily mean that men are well represented descriptively. This paper challenges the implicit assumption that the presence of male legislators ensures that men are well represented. If we ask which men, we may find that certain types of men are over-represented at the expense of others, and that the problem of elite dominance in parliament may be particularly acute amongst men. The growing number of women in parliaments is the result of increased awareness of, and dissatisfaction with, a lack of descriptive representation in parliaments; hence, attempts to increase diversity have often been led by women. As the feminisation of parliaments is a relatively recent occurrence, men comprise the bulk of the longer-serving MPs whose entry into politics preceded efforts to make politics more inclusive. To protect male incumbents from losing their seats, political parties have sometimes sought women who tick multiple “diversity boxes”, thus placing all of the onus for political renewal on women. For all these reasons, we hypothesise that female MPs may be more diverse than their male counterparts. We test this hypothesis using a novel, cross-national dataset on the descriptive characteristics of MPs across a large and heterogenous sample of democracies. Combining existing datasets with original data collection, we assemble individual-level records for every elected MP in the legislatures active between 2015-2017, capturing their variation along four key axes of descriptive diversity: age, social class, ethnicity, and LGBT status. Our dataset allows for unprecedented granularity and comparability, enabling us to identify and compare patterns of descriptive diversity within and across gender categories and political systems. By shifting attention from the numeric over-representation of men to the diversity within male representation, the paper contributes with novel insights to descriptive representation, elite formation, and intersectionality in legislative politics.
