Study says also in governments women are suppressed

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 30/08/2021

Many governments show gender awareness and have if not 50/50 so at least a reasonable balance between women and men as ministers. However, a new study shows that it anyway often takes longer time for women ministers to get the prestigious government positions and that they often have to hold junior roles for longer than their male colleagues before they get the more prominent minister roles.

“Barriers to women’s equal inclusion into politics are becoming subtler and more complex”, the researchers conclude.

Researchers Corinna Kroeber and Joanna Hüffelmann have compiled an original dataset containing information on the career paths of ministers in 27 European countries between 1990 and 2018. Corinna Kroeber is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Greifswald, Germany and Joanna Hüffelmann is a graduate student and Research Assistant at the same university.

“Our data shows that just over 42% of all ministers eventually receive a prestigious portfolio (1,912 of 4,548 in our sample). Interestingly, most of them reach these offices without any previous executive experience (82.9%)”, they say in a blog published by London School of Economics and Political Science.

“Of the remaining ministers who eventually assume responsibility for a prestigious portfolio, ministers worked on average around 29.5 months in less pivotal positions.”

Their study shows that if you are going to make a career as a minister, a smaller cabinet is the best as ministers in smaller cabinets have more promising career prospects than those in larger cabinets. This gap also increases over time.

One potential explanation for this is that larger cabinets simply contain more ministers with less influential posts. Alternatively, more cabinet reshuffles might be an indicator of shorter ministerial careers, the researchers say in their blog.

“Our analysis shows that women have to serve longer as ministers in less prestigious positions before getting to the top. We propose that one reason for this is that even after being selected as a minister, gatekeepers for ministerial positions hold prejudices about women’s competence in relation to certain portfolios.”

“To overcome these prejudices, women have to demonstrate their capabilities more extensively or gather exceptionally high levels of experience compared with men during their time in charge of less pivotal portfolios.”

“Moreover, we propose that holding portfolios strongly associated with feminine stereotypes reinforces doubts about aspirants’ capacity to take on the most prestigious portfolios – an effect that holds true for both women and men.”

The researchers conclude that the executive careers of men and women continue to look very different. Women are often sidelined for long periods in secondary portfolios with less prestige.

“This pattern suggests that barriers to women’s equal inclusion into politics are becoming subtler and more complex.”