Gender mainstreaming and the substantive representation of women: where do parliamentary bodies fit?

Over the past 20 years here has been a proliferation around the world of parliamentary bodies with a gender equality mandate. Yet they are often overlooked because they don’t fit easily into existing frameworks for comparing national machineries for the advancement of women or women’s policy agencies. Nor have they been made visible in much of the work on the substantive representation of women, even as such work has broadened out from a focus on individual critical actors to encompass collectivities. This paper looks at existing theoretical frameworks in order to identify which elements can best be applied to the study of gender-focused parliamentary bodies. In doing so, it seeks to make such bodies more visible as a form of feminist institution-building and presents a checklist of elements to support the “feminist” label. As a case study, it examines the work of the parliamentary groups on population and development that now exist in some 65 parliaments around the world and at regional levels. Overall, the paper argues the importance of going “beyond numbers” to explore the institutional settings that facilitate the substantive representation of diverse groups of women.