Women Legislating for Women: Representing Women’s Interests in the German Bundestag

Whether women in parliament represent the interests of women in society is considered of high importance in the justification of promoting higher levels of female representation in legislative bodies. On issues specifically concerning women, this has shown to be true in several legislatures, however, usually in a context of rather high levels of female representation in a personalized electoral system or in the context of a two-party system. The German Bundestag can be considered a hard case for this question, when the party groups’ gate-keeping role regarding access to elected office and its dominance in the legislative process, as well as the low levels of female representation are taken into account. Analysing legislative debates and votes on the legislation most crucial to the promotion of women’s position in society over the course of the German Bundestag (1949 – 2021) this paper shows that gendered behaviour does indeed occur, even when women are represented at very low rates in parliament