Abstract (EN)

While the legal rules seeking to establish gender equality within political assemblies are multiplying and increasingly constraining, and are by now extended to other social spaces, they have failed to counteract the masculine leadership on the political microcosm. This paper interrogates the ambivalent effects of gender equality laws. Surveys conducted in 2001 and 2014 show that professional politicians, while declaring themselves to be fully supportive of gender equality, manage to control the selection and the circulation of elected officials. Playing the rules allows for a supervised entry of women into politics, while the highlighting of a few symbols conceals the frailty of the professionalization process of most politician women. The backstage as well as the real power sites of the political space remain exclusive spaces and the symbolic staging of the political field contributes to maintaining the status quo of masculine domination. Gender equality is used in a way that is functional to the reproduction of a gender order that differentiates between and hierarchizes gender hierarchies, thus facilitating the preservation of in-group sociability.