Women, Participation and the European Parliament

The European Parliament (EP) as an institution can be understood as having the potential for becoming ‘a strong public’ which is undergoing a process of building a wider general public: ‘The EP can be conceived of as an incipient transnational public sphere’ (Liebert 2007: 268). This makes the EP an apt institutional setting for analyzing both women´s descriptive representation within it, as well as analyzing the debates about women´s representation, in politics and business, which are taking place within the EP. We thus conduct a two-pronged analysis of the who of public sphere participation (Ferree et al. 2002) by looking both at the gender composition of the EP and the framing of debates about women´s representation within the EP and its Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) during the period 2000-2011