Gendered Leaky Pipelines to Power: Policy Specialisation, Homosocial Networks, and Political Advancement

Across advanced democracies, women’s descriptive representation has increased substantially, yet gendered inequalities in political careers persist. South Korea and Taiwan exemplify this paradox. Since the early 1990s, both countries have experienced a fourfold rise in women’s parliamentary presence, driven by gender quotas and democratic consolidation. Nevertheless, women legislators remain significantly less likely than men to secure re-election, advance to senior legislative, executive, or party leadership positions, and are disproportionately likely to exit politics after a single term. This paper explains this persistent “leaky pipeline” by linking gendered patterns of issue specialisation to clientelistic political opportunity structures. Drawing on gender and politics scholarship on opportunity structures, informal institutions, and the gendered valuation of political labour, the paper advances a structural argument: women’s stalled political careers are not primarily the result of individual deficits or voter bias, but of an elective affinity between clientelistic electoral incentives and male-dominated issue domains. Despite their status as consolidated democracies, South Korea and Taiwan retain strong clientelistic party–voter linkages and materialist voter expectations, reinforced by mixed-member electoral systems in which district races remain decisive. In this context, policy domains traditionally associated with men—such as agriculture, construction, fisheries, defence, and regional development—offer clear opportunities for geographically targeted benefits, enabling legislators to cultivate personal vote bases and signal constituency service. By contrast, policy areas disproportionately prioritised by women legislators—such as childcare, gender equality, care work, and welfare reform—are typically programmatic, national in scope, and less easily convertible into localised electoral rewards. As a result, women face a structural disadvantage even when they perform substantive representation effectively. Their policy work aligns poorly with dominant clientelistic logics, while prevailing gender norms further constrain their ability to engage in time-intensive, informal constituency service. These dynamics are especially consequential when women transition from party-list positions—where quotas are more effective—to district-level competition, where clientelism and personal vote cultivation are paramount. Empirically, the paper employs a mixed-methods design combining quantitative and qualitative evidence from South Korea and Taiwan between 2000 and 2020. Quantitative analyses draw on eight electoral cycles, more than 100,000 bill sponsorship records, and detailed career trajectories to examine how gender, issue focus, and region-targeted policymaking shape re-election probabilities and career advancement. Qualitative evidence from thirty elite interviews with legislators across parties illuminates how clientelistic expectations, materialist voter demands, and gendered norms of political availability—such as expectations of “24/7” constituency service—are experienced and navigated in practice. The paper makes three contributions to gender and politics research. First, it demonstrates that gendered career inequality is produced through issue-based political opportunity structures rather than candidate-level shortcomings. Second, it highlights how clientelism and informal institutions systematically devalue forms of policy work central to women’s substantive representation. Third, it calls for a rethinking of quota policies and electoral reforms that expand women’s entry into politics without addressing the gendered political economy of issue specialisation that continues to shape who can remain and advance in power.