The Gendered Division of Labor in Assignments to Political Committees: Discrimination or Self-Selection in Danish Local Politics?

Abstract

The literature on the descriptive representation of women in parliaments is voluminous, and most studies focus on different levels of women's representation across legislatures (e.g., Krook 2010; Matland 1998; Paxton 1997; Reynolds 1999; Siaroff 2000). The number of women in parliaments is counted across the globe, and explanations as to what facilitates and hinders the election of female politicians are sought. At a macro level, PR systems, high district magnitudes, and, of course, gender quotas are some of the institutional mechanisms that have been identified as advantageous for women's ambitions to conquer seats in legislatures. These aspects of the electoral system have also drawn widespread attention among electoral engineers, since they can be manipulated, far more so than can socioeconomic factors (such as women's educational level or participation in the labor market) or cultural factors (such as dominant religion or the cultural perception of women's societal role), both of which have also been identified as important to women's descriptive representation at the parliamentary level (see, e.g., Christmas-Best and Kjaer 2007).