Women’s Representation in the European Parliament: A Fine Grained Analysis based on Various Age Groups

Hundreds, if not, thousands of studies have analyzed the constituents of high women’s representation in elected office. These studies have identified the institutional, socio-economic and cultural constituents of high women’s descriptive representation. In this research, we add another chapter to this literature by highlighting that gender is no constant. Rather, based on a study of all Members of the European Parliament, who have ever served in Brussels and Strasbourg, we highlight through descriptive and inferential statistics that younger women aged 18 to 40 are more than twice as highly represented as older women in their 50s and 60s. In addition, we show that the influence of predictors of high women’s representation differs with age. For example, leftist parties are significantly more likely to nominate younger women and unlikely to nominate older women. In contrast, older women aged 50 and higher disproportionally benefit from gender quotas, while the same is not true for younger women.