Mothers and Fathers in Parliament: MP Parental Status and Family Gaps from a Global Perspective

Abstract

AbstractStudies of Western parliaments find women experience greater difficulty than men in combining parenting with a career in parliament. Is it the same worldwide? Addressing this issue, we compared the marital and parental status of legislators in 25 diverse parliaments around the world while theoretically exploring whether parliamentary family gaps are due to individual, family, institutional, societal or global-level conditions. Through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we find institutional- and societal-level factors matter. Namely, family gaps between men and women members of parliament (MPs) were narrower under conditions of higher female employment, women in parliamentary leadership and lower rates of child mortality. Thus, motherhood penalties for women MPs are likely to diminish with increases in women’s paid employment, better social welfare provisions and more women in parliamentary leadership positions. Our findings also point to the importance of public policies, parliamentary rules and critical actors in reducing time demands on parents who are MPs.