Gender, Parenthood, and Parliamentary Institutions

Calls to make parliaments gender sensitive or diversity sensitive emerged over two decades ago, when the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) initiated a study of how various features of parliaments’ organization and rules affected elected women (Childs and Palmieri Reference Childs, Palmieri, Sawer, Banaszak, True and Kantola2023). Over time, aiming for gender sensitive parliaments, defined as those where barriers to women’s participation have been removed, has “become an international norm” (Palmieri Reference Palmieri2022). International organizations, and particularly the International Parliamentary Union (IPU), have been at the forefront of these efforts (Childs and Palmieri Reference Childs, Palmieri, Sawer, Banaszak, True and Kantola2023), with many national parliaments responding by examining whether their policies and procedures served as barriers to women.

Parliamentary workplaces pose several challenges to parents, particularly those caring for small children. Most parliaments require in-person participation during sitting periods, yet do not offer parental leave in the traditional sense or permit members to bring their children into the chamber. News reporting has called attention to instances all around the world of women MPs being barred from entering their assemblies with their infants due to prohibitions on “strangers” or “visitors” in the assembly’s standing orders.Footnote ³ Another difficulty for MPs with young children is the heavy workload combined with travel required for the job. Sitting schedules vary considerably across assemblies, but it is not uncommon for sitting days to be excessively long, with debates and votes happening in the evening and sometimes lasting well into the night (Frech, Bailer, and Bütikofer Reference Frech, Bailer and Bütikofer2024; Frech and Kopsch Reference Frech and Kopsch2024). Members who don’t reside in the capital city must travel to the assembly during sitting weeks and then travel back to their districts for weekends and other non-sitting days to attend to constituency demands (Franceschet and Rayment Reference Franceschet and Rayment2025).

As women entered politics in greater numbers, calls for reform emerged, and some parliaments responded with mechanisms to accommodate parents. In 2016, the lower house of Australia’s parliament changed its standing orders to permit “infants being cared for by a Member” into the chamber (House of Representatives, Standing Orders). In 2019, British MPs voted in favor of a change to their parliament’s standing orders, permitting MPs on parental leave to vote by proxy.Footnote ⁴ That same year, Canada’s House of Commons voted to allow MPs to take 12 months of parental leave, during which time MPs would not be penalized for missing parliamentary sessions (Ryckewaert Reference Ryckewaert2019). In most elected assemblies, however, including in Germany, the infrastructure, standing orders, and parliamentary norms have not yet changed in response to women’s greater presence and the challenges experienced by those caring for small children.

Accommodating parents through changes to parliamentary procedures is certainly possible. Parliamentarians do have agency. They could introduce remote voting for MPs with a sick child home from school for the week. Indeed, legislatures around the world regularly adjust their procedural rules. In a three-country analysis of these rule changes from 1945 to 2010, Sieberer, Müller, and Heller (Reference Sieberer, Müller and Heller2011) show that “parliamentary actors constantly decide whether to conduct business in line with existing rules or to change them” (949, emphasis added). Loewenberg (Reference Loewenberg2003), Sieberer, Müller, and Heller (Reference Sieberer, Müller and Heller2011), and others converge upon the assessment that rule changes are endogenous to existing interests within these legislative settings. That said, for the purposes of our study of family-friendlier parliamentary workplaces, not all MPs share the same influence over rule changes. As Heller (Reference Heller2001) asserts, “The government gets what it wants in multiparty parliaments,” both by virtue of coalition agreements and because coalition members value maintaining the government (781). Thus, for parliaments to make their procedures family friendlier, enough MPs must favor it. Further, these MPs probably need to be in the government coalition, and they must view achieving these procedural changes as either a coalition goal or worth the costs of defection.

Feminist institutionalist approaches to studying parliaments offer several important insights into why substantive reforms to parliamentary institutions are entirely possible yet variable (Chappell and Waylen Reference Chappell and Waylen2013; Erikson and Verge Reference Erikson and Verge2022; Krook and Mackay Reference Krook and Mackay2011). The first insight is that institutions reflect the power relations that existed at the time of their creation, thereby reproducing those relations through institutional rules and practices (Franceschet Reference Franceschet, Mackay and Krook2011; Lowndes Reference Lowndes2020; Waylen Reference Waylen2017). Institutions persist precisely because they prescribe regularized and rule-abiding behavior and proscribe behavior that deviates from those rules (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1986). Particularly when it comes to core parliamentary operations, such as deliberating and voting on legislation, the tradition of doing so face-to-face is deeply entrenched and perceived as integral to how deliberative bodies ought to operate. The unwillingness of most parliaments to permit members to vote remotely even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic shows how physical presence during voting is considered a non-negotiable pillar of parliamentary practice.Footnote ⁵

Second, many of the rules through which the status quo is reproduced are not codified in laws, policies, or standing orders but are communicated informally. Such informal rules are “sticky” in large part because they cannot be reformed via statute but only change when political actors repeatedly disregard them without sanction, leading certain rules to gradually lose force (see Mackay Reference Mackay2014; Waylen Reference Waylen2017). Norms around “presentism,” and always being available to parties and constituents, and for parliamentary work more generally, are reinforced by signals of disapproval that members perceive if they opt out of political work to fulfill caretaking roles (Erikson and Joseffson Reference Erikson and Josefsson2019). Structurally, institutional change to make parliaments family-friendly is difficult because it requires changes to parliamentary cultures that members perceive as integral to their roles.

Based upon these simultaneous facts — institutional change is entirely possible yet nonetheless may be challenging to achieve — it is worthwhile to explore how elected politicians themselves think about parental accommodations. To date, few studies have examined MPs’ experiences of tensions between their parenthood and political roles, or whether MPs support policies to relieve these tensions. Three exceptions with direct relevance for our study require discussion here. In one, Allen, Cutts, and Winn (Reference Allen, Cutts and Winn2016) surveyed and interviewed MPs in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies, bodies that were designed to be gender-sensitive and family-friendly. Notably, the authors found women to be more dissatisfied than men with the effectiveness of such measures (Allen, Cutts, and Winn Reference Allen, Cutts and Winn2016, 563). Although their survey did not ask politicians whether they would support more robust family-friendly mechanisms, the fact that women report less satisfaction with the limited measures that do exist, like reduced sitting hours and the provision of childcare, can be interpreted as women still struggling to combine politics and caring responsibilities.

Similarly surveying MPs, this time in the case of Canada’s House of Commons, Franceschet and Rayment (Reference Franceschet and Rayment2025) find that party membership has a stronger correlation than gender with MPs’ support for family-friendly policies for their workplace. In Canada’s multiparty system, Conservative Party membership, in particular, signaled lower support for parental accommodations, while membership in more progressive parties, like the New Democratic and Liberal parties, signaled higher support. Third, a study by Frech and Kopsch (Reference Frech and Kopsch2024) also directly asked politicians, this time members of the European Parliament (MEPs), about their experiences combining parenthood roles with parliamentary work. Interviews with women and men MEPs with children reveal that fathers report fewer difficulties than mothers when it comes to balancing work and family, “leading them to perceive reforms as less urgent” (Frech and Kopsch Reference Frech and Kopsch2024, 7). The findings in all three of these studies directly inform how we theorize potential opposition to parliamentary rule changes in our case study of German parliaments.

We start by considering which specific voices, in specific structural positions within assemblies, are likely to oppose extending family care considerations for MPs. As in Loewenberg (Reference Loewenberg2003) and Sieberer, Müller, and Heller (Reference Sieberer, Müller and Heller2011), we theorize that opposition to parenthood accommodations may be part and parcel of those existing power arrangements that advantage some parliamentarians more than others. Men, less burdened by gendered expectations about how much time they spend with their children, may be less supportive of changes to a status quo that works very well for them, as evidenced by their continued numerical dominance in electoral politics in Germany and in appointments to cabinets.Footnote ⁶ Women, on the other hand, are disadvantaged by the status quo so long as societal gender norms continue to disproportionately burden mothers with childrearing and caretaking roles. In fact, because the status quo is reinforced not merely by formal rules but also reproduced through a parliamentary culture that prioritizes physical presence and availability, men in politics need not actively oppose reforms to current parliamentary procedures. Instead, men who do not support change “can draw on the institutional context for power resources and tools that enable them to protect the status quo” (Josefsson Reference Josefsson2024, 29). Politicians can resist changes that would benefit women simply by expressing their support for parliamentary traditions like face-to-face deliberations and framing such support as upholding the core function of parliaments.

Another possible source of opposition lies with political parties who stake ideological claims on whether and how the state interacts with families and domestic life. The two most socially conservative parties at the national level in Germany are the Christian Social Union (CSU; this is the Bavaria-based sister party of the Christian Democratic Union, CDU) and the far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD, established 2013), which valorizes the traditional family as part of its focus on “protecting” German society against cultural change (Arzheimer Reference Arzheimer2015; Franceschet, Och, and Xydias Reference Franceschet, Och and Xydias2025; Xydias Reference Xydias2020; Xydias Reference Xydias2024). At the center-right, the CDU under Angela Merkel’s chancellorship pursued policies to encourage women’s labor force participation by expanding the availability of childcare; the party is less traditionalist than the CSU, but still more traditionalist than parties generally viewed as left-leaning. This traditionalism is still clearly in evidence in the party’s family policies, even over the course of changing preferences (von Wahl Reference Wahl2008).

The other nationally successful parties, including the Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP), Greens, and the Left, are all relatively progressive on gender and family-related issues, although the FDP, as a libertarian party, does not support an interventionist state (Xydias Reference Xydias2024). These inter-party differences mean that members of socially traditionalist parties may be less likely to support parental accommodations, and they may express support for a stay-at-home parent (in practice, a stay-at-home mother) as their rationale. These parties include, at the national level, the CDU, CSU, and AfD. Sub-national legislatures in Fall 2023 included several other small parties that are categorized as socially traditionalist (identified in Table 1, below). Members of the FDP may express concern about the challenges of balancing parenthood with a political career, but they may, ideologically, be opposed to extensive infrastructure (e.g., state-led expansion of childcare availability) as the solution. In keeping with their libertarian principles, FDP members are likely to consider balancing family and politics as an individual rather than institutional problem.

Table 1.

Survey respondents’ party affiliation

Table 1. Long description

The table has five columns: Party, Men N, Women N, Total Respondents, and Is Party in Government. From top to bottom, the rows are: Af D with 15 men, 1 woman, 16 total, not in government; B 90 slash Gr with 9 men, 32 women, 41 total, in government at Bundestag and 10 states; B D with 1 man, 0 women, 1 total, not in government; C D U with 20 men, 13 women, 33 total, in government in 8 states; C S U with 3 men, 1 woman, 4 total, in government in Bavaria; F D P with 4 men, 2 women, 6 total, in government at Bundestag and 2 states; F W with 1 man, 2 women, 3 total, in government in Bavaria; L I N K E with 9 men, 9 women, 18 total, in government in 3 states; S P D with 20 men, 14 women, 34 total, in government at Bundestag and 11 states. The final row totals are 82 men, 74 women, 156 respondents. Notes clarify that B D and F W are center-right parties active only at the state level, and parties marked with an asterisk are socially traditionalist.

Notes: BD (Bündnis Deutschland) is a center-right party that formed in late 2022. FW (Freie Wähler) is a center-right party, formally active since 2009. Both BD and FW currently only hold office at the state level.

* These parties are broadly socially traditionalist, in terms of their support for traditionally gendered family models (see Xydias Reference Xydias2024).

Finally, as noted above, not all parties have the same potential leverage on procedural changes. If voices expressing lower urgency about (or even outright resistance to) family-friendlier policies are concentrated within parties with greater procedural control, then this, too, would help explain policy inaction. Alternatively, voices in favor of adopting parental accommodations could be concentrated within parties with lesser control. Thus, the discussion of our findings will also consider parties’ procedural leverage in terms of their inclusion in governing coalitions.

In sum, a large body of scholarship, especially work studying parliaments through a feminist institutionalist lens, has revealed not only how women’s inequality is maintained despite improved access to electoral politics but also why parliamentary workplaces are relatively immune to change that would benefit women (and men with caretaking responsibilities). Our study contributes to this growing literature. We ask German politicians about their (1) experiences of parenting while pursuing a political career and (2) levels of support for six concrete types of parental accommodations. Doing so allows us to develop a profile of MPs’ attitudes toward this issue and to see which MPs support family-friendly policies and which ones might be a barrier to reform.

Based on the scholarly literature on gender, parliamentary workplaces, and political parties, we expect that women survey respondents will report greater difficulty reconciling parenthood and politics and also be more supportive than men of policies that accommodate parenthood. We also expect that parents of dependent children (18 and under) will be more supportive of parenthood accommodations, as will parents with longer commutes, because these two factors make having a career objectively more difficult (McQuaid and Chen Reference McQuaid and Chen2012; Sperandio and Devdas Reference Sperandio and Devdas2014). Based upon extensive evidence of persistent East-West differences in how Germans manage the simultaneous challenges of working outside the home and parenting (see Barth et al, Reference Barth, Jessen, Spieß and Wrohlich2020; and Mätzke Reference Mätzke2019, 58), we expect respondents who grew up in the former GDR to be more open to policies for making political work family-friendlier than their Western counterparts. Mätzke (Reference Mätzke2019) refers to these persistent East-West differences in terms of “behavioral legacies [and] gender and family norms” (60). Finally, we expect members of socially traditionalist parties to express lower levels of support for parenthood accommodations.

Gender Norms and Women’s Representation in German Politics

Germany makes a particularly interesting case for our study. Despite increases in the proportion of women in elected office and the adoption of policies to facilitate women’s participation in the workforce, procedures and norms in German parliaments have not changed to accommodate members with caring responsibilities. After the 1994 elections, women held 26 percent of seats in the Bundestag (lower house of parliament), which was markedly above the global average in that year of 11.8% (IPU Parline, Women in Parliaments Dataset, accessed October 2024). The proportion has fluctuated over the last 30 years but has increased overall, peaking in the 2013 federal election (36.3%) and hitting 35.3% in the 2021 election (IPU, 2024). Eder, Fortin-Rittberger, and Kroeber (Reference Eder, Fortin-Rittberger and Kroeber2016, 376) show that women’s presence across German state parliaments is similar in the aggregate, although they note considerable sub-national variation. Although Germany lacks legislated gender quotas, several individual parties have adopted them for candidate lists at all levels of representation (i.e., all elected bodies from which we invited respondents). The national parties with quotas include the Greens, the Left, and the SPD.Footnote ⁷ Institutional differences between these parties’ quotas produce further variation in women’s rates of election; for example, the Greens’ bylaws stipulate that a woman candidate be placed at the top of each electoral list, which yields women’s election rates above 50% (see discussion in Xydias Reference Xydias2024, 86–92). These formal differences between parties largely reflect the extent to which these organizations acknowledge women’s underrepresentation as an issue that requires action (Xydias Reference Xydias2024, 69–76).

In turn, candidate nomination processes in Germany include many informal elements that disadvantage aspirants who have family-care responsibilities. Although German political parties and their internal processes are highly regulated both by the Federal Parties Act (1967) and by the Basic Law itself, inequities persist in aspirants’ opportunities to be seen, appreciated by the party, and consequently nominated. More generally, in Germany and beyond, political careers are highly demanding for both men and women. Ascending upward into state and, especially, federal politics informally involves the Ochsentour (ox tour, meaning “slog”). In German hiking culture, an Ochsentour refers to a long-distance covering of challenging terrain. Analogously, German political culture largely demands that politicians begin working in local politics and rise through the ranks gradually, demonstrating their loyalty and willingness to work for their party at every step (Davidson-Schmich Reference Davidson-Schmich2016; Höhne Reference Höhne2020). Especially at earlier stages of this process, social events and engagement outside regular working hours are extensive and pose challenges to aspirants with family obligations (Kolinsky Reference Kolinsky1991; Krook Reference Krook, LeDuc, Niemi and Norris2014).

Once elected to the federal parliament, in particular, members with small children have few policies to accommodate them. Salaries and benefits for members of the Bundestag are governed by the Members of the Bundestag Act, which does not explicitly offer parental leave to members. Instead, the financial penalties normally applied to members who miss plenary sittings are not applied in cases of maternity or in cases where a member has a dependent child (under 14) who is ill (Deutscher Bundestag 2021). Entry to the plenary chamber is governed by the Bundestag’s Rules of Procedure, which restrict entry to Members of the Bundestag or Bundesrat, members of the cabinet (not all of whom are sitting members of the Bundestag), and staff who are specifically authorized to be there. Such rules can be invoked to stop members from entering the chamber with their infants or to nurse their infants during a sitting. Although a comprehensive and current dataset of Germany’s state legislative rules does not exist, restrictions on infants appear to exist across the sub-national level.

A recent event in the Bundestag illustrates the potential for change, and yet also the inadequacy of informal provisions. Hanna Steinmüller, MP with Germany’s B90/Greens, made history on 23 September 2025 when she delivered a speech to the Bundestag plenary session holding her 10-month-old infant.Footnote ⁸ Julia Klöckner (CDU), president of the Bundestag since March 2025, described Steinmüller’s actions as “masterful” ( bravourös ), writing that an infant in the plenum is now allowable under specific circumstances. The baby slept through the historic event. While Bundestag President Klöckner’s informal support of MP Steinmüller’s actions is a positive sign, allowing infants in the chamber would still need to be integrated into the official Rules of Procedure to be a reliable accommodation for parents.

Further, the broader social and cultural context for motherhood in Germany remains challenging, in spite of advances in the 21st century. In global comparison, contemporary supports for parents upon the birth or adoption of a child in Germany are relatively sound. As von Wahl argues, the CDU/CSU and SPD grand coalition elected in 2005 significantly expanded parental supports in a move that signaled “a new consensus…pulling towards a new middle ground where compensation for lost salary for women, fathers’ involvement, and a stronger reliance on public childcare for the young reflects current needs and expectations rather than images of compulsory stay-at-home mothers and emotionally removed working fathers” (2008, 44). Publicly funded childcare infrastructure has expanded significantly since the late 1990s, with particular focus on facilities appropriate for pre-Kindergarten-age children under three (see Mätzke Reference Mätzke2019). At the same time, significant regional differences persist between East and West. As Mätzke (Reference Mätzke2019) writes, “Eastern German regions have all coverage rates of more than 50 per cent, which none of the western German regions has, and … the gap between the eastern and the western part of the county is greater (23.7 percentage points) than any inter-regional variation within eastern or western Germany” (50). Next to highly regionalized childcare availability, which is inadequate to meet demand,Footnote ⁹ parenting while working outside the home remains difficult in Germany in several additional ways. Structurally, school schedules in many parts of the country remain incompatible with a full workday for parents/guardians.Footnote ¹⁰ Culturally, childcare labor continues to fall disproportionately to women.Footnote ¹¹ The combination of these latter forces produces distinctly gendered challenges for mothers wishing to pursue a career.

Primary school children’s school day, for example, traditionally ends midday, requiring a caregiver’s availability during regular working hours. Schools have expanded all-day programming since the turn of the century, such that 42% were all-day schools by 2011 (Stecher Reference Stecher2011). Yet this leaves many families without clear options, especially in those regions with especially acute childcare availability. Studies of German education systems indicate that social class, too, corresponds both with children’s educational achievement and with gendered occupational patterns (Betthäuser, Trinh, and Fasang Reference Betthäuser, Trinh and Fasang2023).

In addition, norms about motherhood continue to favor the stay-at-home caretaker as the ideal mother, even while this family arrangement is less affordable for lower-income families. Studies show that this norm has actually grown more forceful in the former GDR since Germany’s reunification in 1990, such that younger (East) German women are more critical of mothers who work outside the home than older generations of women socialized during an era of full employment (Barth et al. Reference Barth, Jessen, Spieß and Wrohlich2020). The term Rabenmutter (raven mother) captures the trope that women who return to work when their children are young are bad mothers (Franceschet, Och, and Xydias Reference Franceschet, Och and Xydias2025; Heidenfelder and Aufmkolk Reference Heidenfelder and Aufmkolk2020). Cultural ideas about motherhood are reflected in gender gaps in employment. According to data from 2019, 93.1% of fathers with children under six work full-time, compared to just 27.4 percent of women with children under six (D-Statis n.d.). Mothers who participate in the workforce often work part-time.

These realities of, and norms around, parenthood in Germany lead us to expect that women parliamentarians will be much more attentive to the challenges of “reconciling” their political careers with family responsibilities than their male counterparts. That said, and even while the Rabenmutter trope is nationwide, German political parties vary in the degree to which they valorize traditional gender roles. As discussed in the preceding section, three of Germany’s national parties, the CDU, CSU, and AfD, have maintained commitments to upholding the “traditional family,” in particular when children are young, with a stay-at-home mother and working father.

Data and Methods

Our data collection consisted of a survey directed to all sitting national and state-level legislators in Germany. Surveys and in-person interviews are the most direct tools for learning about officeholders’ attitudes, with surveys permitting the widest range of subjects. Yet elite surveys present trade-offs for researchers, including declining response rates for a variety of reasons. Kertzer and Renshon (Reference Kertzer and Renshon2022) document the increase in prevalence of political elite surveys, making more demands on elites’ time, and Campbell and Bolet (Reference Campbell and Bolet2022) document the kind of pushback that audits and similar studies can elicit. Indeed, we received (13 December 2023) an email from someone invited to take our survey who stated that they no longer participate in research, explaining that they had recently been included in an audit study that involved deception (a “FakeUmfrage”), which they viewed as ethically unacceptable. They stated sarcastically that we can thank political scientists at [University] for their unwillingness to participate in our study.

Declining response rates to elite surveys led us to look beyond national representatives to increase our subject pool. We distributed our survey about attitudes toward family-friendly practices to both state and national legislators in Germany in the summer and fall of 2023. This population consisted of 2648 invited subjects.Footnote ¹² Two states (Bavaria and Hesse) held elections October 2023; members of those bodies were contacted after the new legislative term began. We received 156 completed and usable responses, a 5.9% response rate.Footnote ¹³ Despite a relatively low response rate, the sample is sufficiently representative to learn what German politicians think about parenthood accommodations and whether their attitudes vary by gender and their party’s ideology (see Table 1).

Women politicians made up 47.4% of responses and state legislators made up 80.8%, an over-representation of both women (who comprised 34.1% of our invitees) and state legislators (who comprised 71.7% of our invitees). The proportion of parents in our sample closely mirrors that of the German population: 79.2% of respondents (75.4% of women and 82.5% of men) reported having children, similar to data reported by the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). According to Destatis’s 2022 micro-census data, 20% of women between 45 and 49 do not have children, a figure that has remained stable since 2012.Footnote ¹⁴ Women with a high level of education, a category that elected officials are more likely to be in, are less likely to have children, even more similar to our survey: 23%.

Both our survey results and Destatis micro-census data are higher than some other datasets. For example, Franceschet, Och, and Xydias’s (Reference Franceschet, Och and Xydias2025) analyses of Bundestag members’ reported rates of parenthood found that 66.6% of women and 72.7% of men state that they are parents in their online Bundestag biographical sketches. These differences in reported rates of parenthood could be a result of selection bias in our survey sample. Our invitation message for recruiting subjects indicated that we were interested in hearing from both parents and non-parents, stating, “We encourage your participation whether or not you have children” (please see Appendix B for the text of our recruitment email). In spite of this direct encouragement, some non-parents may have self-selected out of the survey believing the survey less relevant to them, but the low response rate could also be due to a reticence about sharing personal information. As we discuss in our results section, those who took the survey provided diverse responses, indicating that the sample is not systematically skewed towards those holding particular views.

Beyond the practicality of expanding our pool of invitees, including both state and national legislatures in this study is justified for several reasons. They are similar enough workplaces, situated within the same broader cultural context, to produce meaningful insights into our research question about managing family care responsibilities while pursuing a political career in Germany. At the same time, some differences between these two levels of government add important nuance to our findings, in particular regarding the role that the political party plays in legislators’ experiences of balancing their family and career.

In Germany’s federal system, the 16 state parliaments vary in their number of seats (ranging from 51 in Saarland to 205 in Bavaria) and finer-grained institutional features, but, otherwise, they share significant similarities. All German state parliaments are unicameral, elected via broadly proportional rules. Most state parliaments use mixed-member proportional rules that are very similar to Bundestag elections. In terms of the work these legislatures do, Gunlicks (2003) characterizes state-level legislatures as more engaged in administration and constituency service work than the Bundestag (221–229). We have reasoned that more extensive constituency labor could place more time pressure on state legislators than their national counterparts. However, this pressure may be offset by a shorter commute.

Even very small parties regularly field Bundestag candidates. However, in terms of seat share, multipartism is more extensive sub-nationally. In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025), eight different parties held one or more seats in the Bundestag (AfD, B90/Greens, CDU, CSU, FDP, LINKE, SPD, SSW), while many more parties are represented sub-nationally. In 2023, the federal governing coalition included the SPD (with Olaf Scholz as chancellor), the B90/Greens, and the FDP. (See Appendix A for state governments’ composition at the time of our survey.) Thus, pooling state and national legislators together also adds more diverse observations of ideology and party.

The questionnaire posed a series of questions about subjects’ family status (do they have children? Did they have children when first elected to political office?) as well as their attitudes toward (a) balancing a political career and family life, and (b) a series of possible policies for making parliamentary workplaces family-friendlier. Subjects were also asked about the duration of their commute between home and their legislative workplaces. This latter variable addresses the additional challenges of a longer commute for attending to family responsibilities. Several open-ended questions prompted subjects to elaborate on these experiences and attitudes, and to comment on family/workplace policies that they would support. (See Appendix B for the full questionnaire.)

Since our research questions in this paper concern variation in support for and resistance against these policies, we constructed two dependent variables. First, we have a DV for respondents’ perception of the difficulty of parenting while pursuing a political career. For this DV, we have added together respondents’ answers to two questions: whether they think it is difficult to be successful as a politician and as a parent (where 5 = very difficult and 1 = generally not problematic), and their agreement with the statement that it is easy to combine a political career with family life (where 5 = absolutely disagree and 1 = fully agree). Thus, this DV’s values range from 2 to 10. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for these two items is 0.856, which is a high level of correspondence and affirms combining them together meaningfully. Our second DV is also a composite variable, and it sums six survey questions that address respondents’ attitudes towards numerous commonly adopted policies to make parliamentary workplaces family-friendlier. The range in values for this second constructed DV was 6–30 (i.e., a max of 30 if a subject indicated a “5” for all six questions). The distribution of this DV is left-skewed, with a mean of 20.74 and a standard deviation of 6.20. However, there is sufficient variation to model statistically. Further diagnostics show that these eight component variables are also highly correlated with one another, with an alpha coefficient of 0.758. This Cronbach’s alpha affirms this composite DV, as well.

Finally, these survey responses were merged with biographical data recorded from these legislators’ official parliamentary biographical sketches (e.g., Friedrich Merz’s bio: https://www.bundestag.de/abgeordnete/biografien/M/merz_friedrich-1046080). We report no names or identifying personal details in our results. However, merging survey responses with publicly reported data permits us to include legislators’ party affiliation and whether they were born and socialized in the former GDR, without needing to ask subjects to take the time to answer.

In our discussion of results in the sections that follow, we include descriptive statistics of key variables, several OLS models of variation in subjects’ attitudes toward balancing a political career and family life, and a sampling of illustrative open-ended answers. We also pursued an alternative modeling strategy that addresses heteroscedasticity in the OLS models: fractional regression, where the dependent variables take a proportional form. These models produce substantively identical results as the OLS models. For greater ease of interpretation, we report OLS results here.

Alternative Explanations

Although both the quantitative and qualitative results of our survey show variation in attitudes towards adopting family-friendlier policies in German legislative assemblies, most respondents were broadly supportive of reforms. This leaves the persistent puzzle of policy inaction. This section elaborates upon these findings to discuss their implications for policy change.

We have offered evidence that gender corresponds with German parliamentarians’ attitudes towards the challenges of balancing parenthood with their political careers, and that party ideology especially corresponds with the kind of workplace supports that they believe are reasonable. We have argued that these attitudinal patterns point toward an explanation for why these parliamentary workplaces have not become family-friendlier. Men, who remain a numerical majority among legislators, continue to perceive parenting as less challenging. Feminist institutionalist theories emphasize that the norms and working practices in parliaments are difficult to change precisely because of their take-for-granted nature (Chappell and Waylen Reference Chappell and Waylen2013; Erikson and Joseffson Reference Erikson and Josefsson2019). Those who benefit from the status quo do not even need to openly oppose change; their resistance can take the form of simply supporting “the way things are done around here” (see Lowndes Reference Lowndes2020). We believe our findings further contribute to feminist institutionalism’s emphasis on the role that gendered norms play in sustaining a status quo that disadvantages women politicians.

The finding that political party ideology corresponds with parliamentarians’ support for the extent and type of procedural changes adds to this explanation for policy inaction. When given the opportunity to explain their positions in open-ended comments, respondents offer reasons that resonate with their parties’ broader social positions. Based upon these findings, it is possible that assemblies dominated by socially traditionalist parties are less likely to adopt family-friendly procedural changes, because MPs in these parties do not sufficiently support them.

However, not all assemblies are dominated by socially traditionalist parties, and Germany’s 21st-century state legislatures show considerable ideological diversity. At the time when we distributed our survey in 2023, five state legislatures were governed by coalitions that included both the CDU and the B90/Greens. Four were governed by “grand coalitions” including both the CDU and SPD. Six state legislatures were fully left-leaning, featuring combinations of the SPD, B90/Greens, and the LINKE. (See Appendix A) Even as members of the governing coalition (or, in the case of Saarland, governing alone), socially progressive parties have not produced family-friendlier parliamentary rules.

Thus, we next consider an alternative explanation for policy inaction that lies with public opinion. Although Germany has developed more extensive family supports for society more broadly, these do not generally apply to MPs. It remains the fact that MPs (as workers) have fewer workplace supports for family labor than their constituents. However, the public might not favor these accommodations for elected representatives. A Deutschland-Monitor survey from 2023, the year we queried German MPs, speaks in part to this alternative possibility. This surveyFootnote ¹⁶ shows evidence of rather divided sentiments among the German public on two key issues: 1) whether respondents, themselves, view available family-friendly infrastructure as adequate, and 2) their trust in the Bundestag and in their state legislatures.

First, 52.1% of respondents to this nationally representative survey described themselves as very satisfied or satisfied with the availability of childcare options, and just 14.0% described themselves as dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. Although the inadequacy of childcare infrastructure to meet demand in Germany is well known, these response patterns do not indicate a flashpoint on this issue. Second, Deutschland-Monitor ’23 respondents are not deeply negative about their representative assemblies, although there are differences between levels of government. Respondents express greater trust in regional compared to national government, with 50.7% of respondents stating they “trust completely” or “rather trust” their state governments, compared to 38.7% trusting the federal government. Correspondingly, just 14.6% of respondents “rather do not trust” or “trust not at all” their regional governments, compared to 26.1% distrusting the federal government.

While the Deutschland-Monitor ’23 survey did not address all ways in which public opinion might potentially motivate political parties to resist adopting family-friendlier policies, its insights do not clearly explain policy inaction at both the state and federal levels. It seems unlikely that MPs or governing coalitions, at both levels, would be concerned about blowback if they were to take action to accommodate parents in politics.

Taken together, having considered a variety of ideological, structural, and even electoral factors, we return to the finding that MPs in socially traditionalist parties are simply less supportive of parental accommodations than their colleagues in more progressive parties. Although women across parties find parenting and politics more difficult than men, women in the more socially traditionalist parties join their male counterparts in expressing less support for reforming parliamentary practices to accommodate parents. Even a variety of other pressures in favor of family-friendlier parliamentary workplaces have not overcome these ideological positions.