Is there a legislative gender-bias in the European Parliament?

Research suggests that women often need to overcome greater obstacles than men when carrying out similar tasks such as teaching university students, negotiating salaries or being elected to political office. We investigate whether female legislators also face greater obstacles than their male counterparts in the legislative arena. We leverage newly collected data on all types of votes including roll-calls in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2021 to assess whether roll-call votes are more frequently called when a woman is in charge of preparing a bill – when she is the rapporteur. We estimate the legislative gender-bias using a matching strategy to neutralise the effect of common causes of roll-call requests that may be related to gender as well, such as party affiliation, seniority, and legislator ideology. Our results shed light on the proper functioning of legislative assemblies which would be distorted by an anti-female bias.