The indirect effect of gender on perceived career and influence among German national parliamentarians

ABSTRACT

This article investigates mechanisms behind career and influence (in)equality among men and women in the German Parliament (Bundestag). The German members of parliament (MPs) comprises a particularly interesting political elite to study as the parliament already contains a critical mass of women, although the gender regime setting of the country is relatively conservative. To collect the data required for this study, a survey was conducted on the entire German Parliament. This article employs a Structural Equation Model which was confirmed to fit the empirical data well, and shows that, although no general effects of gender were apparent, gender indirectly, through housework demands, affected career and influence as perceived by the MPs themselves (self-assessed).

KEYWORDS:

• Career
• elite
• gender
• Germany
• inequality
• parliament

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Fabrizio Bernardi for useful comments to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jenny L. Hansson is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. She recently defended her doctoral thesis Gender Inequality Among Political Elites in Comparative Perspective at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on gender inequality, political elites and work/life balance in Europe. She has previously published in the European Sociological Review.

Notes

1 The survey-question that underlies this variable is in fact originally developed by the renowned European Social Survey (ESS 2015) (although its wording is slightly adopted to fit MPs; see table A2 of the appendix), and the ESS in fact uses only this single-item variable to measure ‘job/work satisfaction’.

2 Missing values were replaced using full maximum likelihood regression imputation. Concerning weighting: AMOS does not support traditional weighting techniques, so in order to equalize the sizes of the male and female case groups the number of women cases were doubled, resulting in N = 297, of which 156 are females and 141 males.

3 Separate indirect path-effects were computed through setting interfering path(s) to zero during the estimation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 2009-6929].