Feminist Institutional Change: The Case of the UK Women and Equalities Committee

Abstract

The UK Government's decision to establish the Women and Equalities Committee in 2015 redressed an institutional deficit at Westminster - the lack of a Departmental Select Committee holding the Women's Minister and Government Equalities Office to account. This 'effective' reform was by no means a foregone conclusion, however. A feminist institutionalist (FI) approach demonstrates the limitations of traditional accounts of institutional change in accounting for this reform. With greater analytical space given to women's agency and introducing the concept of gendered parliamentarianism, FI captures the gendered constraints and conducive conditions that marked this moment of parliamentary re-gendering: identifying the critical role of women MPs; the new relations between them and women parliamentary Clerks and officials and the wider - crucially gendered - (extra) parliamentary actors and dynamics in play.