Having It All? Reconciling Parliamentary Careers and Motherhood

• In Event: Motherhood and Politics

Abstract

Gender and politics scholars have revealed significant differences between women and men’s parliamentary careers, differences often attributed to gender roles that place greater caretaking burdens on women. While gendered patterns of caretaking are nearly universal, with women spending more time on household and reproductive tasks than men, public policies that help individuals reconcile work and parenting vary widely, as do the rules, practices, and norms that govern the ability to reconcile parliamentary and home life. Despite the importance of reconciliation policies and parliamentary accommodations for motherhood, we lack systematic knowledge about how gender roles, reconciliation policies, and political institutions work together to mitigate gender gaps in parliamentary careers.

Our goal in this paper is to provide an initial assessment about what mix of social policies, electoral rules, and parliamentary governance can improve not just women’s but also mothers’ access to elected office. We compare six parliamentary democracies: Canada, Iceland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These cases ensure variation on factors that we expect to have some explanatory relevance. For example, our cases include social democratic, conservative, and liberal welfare states with highly variable degrees of public support for childcare and generosity of parental leave. Our cases likewise vary in terms of electoral systems, gender quotas, and proportions of women in parliament. Finally, the cases vary on parliamentary features that are less frequently explored by researchers, namely, rules and practices that accommodate (or not) members of parliament (MPs) who have young children or become parents during their terms in office. Our goal is to determine whether men and women’s parliamentary careers are more similar when more policies are in place that allow women to pursue parliamentary careers and motherhood than when these policies are absent.

Authors

• Susan Franceschet, University of Calgary

• Malliga Och, Idaho State University