Making Sense of the Gendered Playing Field in Politics: A Typology of Gendered Institutional Constraints

Abstract Scholars, as well as practitioners, are well aware that engaging in politics is far from a gender-equal business, and they are still grappling with the question of how to understand the web of gendered constraints that continue to privilege men. This article seeks to provide conceptual and analytical tools that facilitate the analysis of the gendered playing field in politics. Based on empirical examples and feminist institutionalist theory, we provide a typology that facilitates the analysis of different types of gendered institutional constraints. Taking the concept of gender-equal political inclusion as our point of departure, we argue that institutional constraints in various nested spheres of society—the social, the political, and the subpolitical—need to be accounted for to adequately capture the complex web of formal as well as informal obstacles in a given context. The usefulness of this typology will be demonstrated with empirical illustrations.