You are unmuted: The impact of virtual arrangements on women and old age legislators’ participation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, parliaments around the world implemented virtual arrangements to facilitate participation by legislators who were negatively affected. This article explores if the pandemic had a differential impact on MP participation in parliamentary proceedings by age or gender and whether virtual arrangements have mitigated these adverse effects. Using the adoption of hybrid proceedings in the United Kingdom House of Commons as its case study, and exploiting the change in its form and application during the pandemic period as treatment, this article demonstrates that the pandemic has had an especially adverse impact on women MPs’ participation in parliamentary proceedings and that virtual arrangements had a substantive role in mitigating the gendered effect of the pandemic when its application was more extensive. These results suggest that maintaining virtual arrangements for parliamentary proceedings post-pandemic is potentially beneficial for the descriptive representation of women.