A Longitudinal Analysis of Gendered Parliamentary Career Pathways and Destinations in the UK House of Commons, 1979-2019

Both career pathways and career destinations in the UK House of Commons – like elsewhere – can be, and often are, gendered. With regard to leadership positions, there has never been a gender-balanced cabinet and rarely has the proportion of female ministers exceeded the proportion of female MPs in Parliament; only recently has there been a gender-balanced shadow cabinet. Despite some progress, female (shadow) ministers still tend to cover policy portfolios that are stereotypically viewed as feminine. This gendered division of labour among frontbench roles is mirrored in backbench activity: female MPs are more likely to sit on select committees that are less prestigious and cover stereotypically feminine policy portfolios and less likely to sit on those which are more prestigious and cover stereotypically masculine policy portfolios; female MPs are less likely to chair select committees that are more prestigious and/or cover masculine policy areas; female MPs are less likely to become policy specialists and more likely to become policy generalists; and female MPs are less likely to be ‘Good House of Commons People’ – those MPs who involve themselves in the internal affairs of Parliament. This paper analyses (changes in) such gendered patterns of horizontal and vertical divisions of labour among leadership and backbench roles in the UK House of Commons between 1979 and 2019. Drawing on a dataset of 2133 MPs and using survival analysis, the paper seeks to explain parliamentary career pathways, parliamentary career apotheosis and, if different, eventual parliamentary career destinations through four sets of variables: (i) MPs’ backgrounds (personal characteristics, education, pre-parliamentary careers, pre-parliamentary political activity, etc.); (ii) constituency-level data (size of majority, distance from Westminster, key statistics regarding education and employment levels, health of population, mix of industry, etc.); (iii) parliamentary activity (committee membership, parliamentary speeches, parliamentary questions, voting record, outside interests, etc.); and (iv) institutional contextual data (size of party, size of government majority, method of selection for committee membership, etc.).