Female Leadership in the EP: Towards gender balance?

Despite the EP’s explicit commitment to gender equality and the promotion of women’s representation, the literature contends that female leadership is not fostered to the same degree (Ahrens and Rolandsen Agustín 2019; Dingler & Fortin- Rittberger, 2022; Kantola & Miller, 2022). In this work, our aim is to investigate whether the gender mainstreaming strategy adopted by the EP at the beginning of the 2000s actually affected the selection of MEPs to access leadership position and transformed gender from a liability into a political resource. To do so, we will propose a quantitative analysis of the main determinants of political leadership in the EP, and we will investigate whether they shape male and female political careers differently and whether some trends towards more gender balance can be detected. Our analysis will rely on an original dataset collecting individual information about MEPs between 1979 and 2022, and will propose an analysis that investigates how individual, institutional and ideological factors interact with gender in determining the access to leadership positions.