The Parliamentary Women's Delegation in France: Making Women's Voices Heard?

Parliamentary Women's Delegations were set up in France in 1999 to introduce gender mainstreaming in legislation. This preliminary study tests their ability to open parliamentary hearings to women and civil society 'to make women's voices heard in legislation'. It demonstrates that the Delegation does indeed consult significantly more women and women's groups than the legislative committees of the National Assembly and sheds light on how this input can be channelled into the legislative process. It sets out a framework for more extensive comparative analysis of gendered participation in parliamentary hearings in France and in other legislatures with dedicated gender-equality bodies, and asks how such bodies influence the balance between bottom-up participative-democratic and top-down expert-bureaucratic modes of operation.