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Early Birds, Short Tenures, And The Double Squeeze: How Gender And Age Intersect With Parliamentary Representation, Devin K. Joshi, Malliga Och

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The gender and age composition of a parliament impacts who is descriptively represented and marginalized and what types of policy ideas and solutions are brought forward or excluded. While important for both descriptive and substantive representation, scholarship on the intersection of gender and age in parliaments has thus far been limited. To broaden our understanding, we conducted a large-scale cross-sectional analysis of the gender and ages of over 20,000 representatives from 78 national assemblies. We identified four types of gender-age patterns depending on whether women enter legislatures younger than men (“early birds”) or have served in parliament for a shorter …