Same but Different? The Political Careers of Female Members of the European Parliament

The European Parliament represents all European citizens and has increased its power dramatically over the past four decades. However, we know very little about the career paths of the members of the European Parliament (MEPs), and even less about the political careers of its female members. In this paper I shed some light on the careers of the still under-represented female MEPs, asking: How can gender explain differences in MEPs' career trajectories? The careers of politicians are determined not only by individual factors but also by institutional opportunity structures (see Borchert 2011). Based on feminist institutionalist considerations I argue that these opportunity structures differ not only between institutional contexts, countries and parties, but can also be gender speciffic. Using a newly collected dataset on the entire career of all German MEPs between 2004-2019 I employ sequence analysis to detect typical career patterns in the rich career data and to show how these careers differ between male and female MEPs. I then analyze the effect of gender on different overall career patterns and on the three career phases: the pre-EP experiences, the success in the EP, and regarding the prestige of post-EP occupations.