“Where are the Women?” Gender and Inter-Parliamentary Delegation Chairs in the European Parliament

Scholars have long noted the relative absence of women in international affairs, particularly imbalances in women in leadership positions in foreign and security policy. This led Cynthia Enloe (1987) to ask, "where are the women" in international relations. We bring this question into a parliamentary context for international engagement, exploring the gendered nature of allocating women’s positions to inter-parliamentary delegation chairs in the European Parliament. Delegation chairs play an important in parliaments by establishing and maintaining inter-parliamentary relationships, whilst contributing to policy-learning through knowledge-building. In this way, they also represent an important bridge between internal parliamentary work and external affairs. We ground our investigation in theories of portfolio allocation in executive and legislative studies. Given that there is no existing national literature on gender and inter-parliamentary delegation leaders to date, we use the European Parliament as a ‘laboratory’ in this context (Fortin-Rittberger, 2025) to explore gendered patterns of selection for inter-delegation parliamentary chairs. We challenge whether existing explanations of executive and legislative allocation apply to the position of interparliamentary delegation leadership, or whether the international relations dimension of their work entails different selection criteria. Using novel data, we provide the first systematic and longitudinal study for the appointment of delegation chairs in the European Parliament, exploring all appointments since the ‘Big Bang’ EU enlargement of 2004. We test various factors that may affect women’s select and that are informed by a combination of parliamentary and international relations theories, including gender equality in the recipient country, its economic importance, and whether the country or region is part of a securitised context. Findings reveal not only the dynamics of gender, power and access to leadership positions for women within the European Parliament, but also the extent to which such distributions symbolically and substantively contribute to the reproduction of international gendered hierarchies.