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Beneath Mainstream Approaches

The overarching aim of this book has been to look ‘beneath the spectacle’ to explore how gender is reproduced in the UK House of Commons everyday. This is because the UK House of Commons enjoys unparalleled visibility in the UK democratic system. Calls to strengthen the UK House of Commons as a democratic actor and leader on gender equality should attend to it as a co-professional organisational setting—that is, not as a unitary actor but composed of different categories and demographics of staff. The gendered terms of arrangements that structure the relationships between these actors are important, not only for a just everyday working life but for legislative outcomes too. This chapter offers some final reflections on the book’s contributions—notably how feminist discursive institutionalist approaches combined with parliamentary ethnography makes for a compelling lens to explore gender and power in parliaments. Drawing on the empirical chapters, the chapter considers five possibilities for parliamentary reform, conceiving of agency as identity-contingent. Although the chapter highlights possibilities for endogenous change, it considers how COVID-19 might affect institutional reform in the UK House of Commons. Overall, this book contributes one discussion towards the broader international feminist project to re-future parliamentary democracy.

workplace-that is, how it was articulated and performed in different meanings, whilst also attending to material structures, ensuring that a critical discursive politics does not entail social weightlessness (McNay 2014). Each chapter sought to analyse how (in)formal institutional arrangements interpellate parliamentary actors as gendered actors in multiple ways. The chapter titles were structured by unequal categorical pairs to show how some bodies and work were evaluated as mattering more or less.
A particular theme throughout the book is that parliaments as political arenas contain overlapping working worlds and actors. To this end, the book has detailed interactions between broader staff who have so far, arguably remained largely spectral to the main Westminster story, and who remain woefully understudied (cf. Laube et al, 2020). In spite of the many studies on gender and the UK House of Commons, less political science studies are available academically that explore the gendered terms of arrangements between different working worlds at the institutional capillaries of the UK House of Commons. This is an opportunity to rethink in political science how we conceive of and investigate a co-professional gendered institution. Whilst not disputing that parliamentarism matters (Palonen 2018, p. 5, cf. Busby 2013, this book has sought to attend to key specificities of a parliamentary workplace.
This final chapter draws the threads together, to reflect upon the three research questions posed in the introduction. I close by identifying and assessing the potential of this framework and approach and its potential for travelling to different parliaments.

How Is Gender Reproduced and How Does Parliamentary Ethnography Help Us to Understand This?
This book is part of an emerging literature that places discursive studies of gender firmly in the sub-disciplinary agenda of parliamentary studies and those studies that specifically work with Butler (Rai and Spary 2019). Feminist approaches to parliaments look beneath the mainstream by taking a holistic approach of the power relations and the practices within parliaments that law-making takes place within. Parliamentary actors are made (un)intelligible through the threefold canopy of the career cycle, citizenship and public service. Through these broad meaning structures, everyday parliamentary working life hangs together through rules and performances and is performatively supported. To analyse each working world, each chapter followed this threefold structure to examine forms of gendering. The terms of institutional arrangements get placed under pressure in different contexts and with evolving understandings and experiences, so there may now be different issues at stake to the ones foregrounded at the time of fieldwork.

'Rules About Gender' in the UK House of Commons
Like many parliaments internationally, actors in the UK House of Commons are layering rules to create a more gender-equal working environment following several reports (Palmieri 2011;Childs 2016). FDI builds on this by 'consider[ing] the gender ideologies found in the institutional discourses focusing on how ideas about women and men and masculinity and femininity are present in its rules' (Lovenduski 2011, p. xi). This is in both rules about gender and rules with gendered effects. Rules about gender do not necessarily guarantee progress and there have been indications of back-sliding on gender equality. It is vital to examine the institutional infrastructures that support gendered bodies. Chapter 5 discussed the embodied aspects of being an MP. Issues around the comprehensiveness and coverage of the rules remained an issue, such as the problem of general elections, where MPs are no longer MPs but are party candidates. Furthermore, parental leave may be undone by gender discourses and subjectivities of embodied public service, and the rational management of family life, and so MPs take less baby leave than they are entitled to. Therefore, these discourses and performances run contradictarily alongside the layering of rules.
When layering rules about gender, delay and obfuscation was an issue. It has been widely acknowledged that transformative change has not materialised in the House of Commons; following the bullying and (sexual) harassment allegations of 2014 and 2017. There was delay in implementing Cox's third recommendation: to establish an entirely independent means for adjudicating a complaint, though now active, and bullying and harassment have not stopped. Calls to strengthen parliament as a democratic actor and to make it an equal place to work need to pay attention to its staff. When assessing rules about gender, parliamentary actors are subject to a new behavioural code that underpins an Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme, but at the time of writing, it is too early to tell how effective it is. Initially, the six month review of the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme found that the implementation team was under-resourced in terms of skills and capacity (Stanley 2019), though this had been improved upon by June 2020 (Willows, 2020). It is unknown how far the changes in remote working have changed power relations in the UK House of Commons and whether it posed new challenges in terms of bullying and harassment, such as preserving the ability to switch off digitally.
Informal rules about gender included devising alternative rules to navigate through the environment such as senior women telling others to keep out of the bars. Chapter 6 included the informal 'reduced to two posts' rule where some clerks would not be placed with two select committee chairs due to a history of bullying that was denied by some participants, but expressed in an equality audit of the circulation procedure. This matters because gender features as a category within these rules as having to 'protect' women, whilst not dealing with the perpetrator-removing the victim, not the harasser. This is performative-it brings about an unequal institutional subject position of 'the Jacqui of most trades' for women and affects their careers and experiences of circulation. The existence of these informal rules operating in the UK House of Commons, combined with Butler's work on speech and self censorship (1997), marks an interesting contrast to the very ideal of a 'debating parliament'.
Finally, in places there were a lack of rules about gender, invoking one of Bacchi's typologies of de-gendering, where gender has not been treated as a relevant category (2017). Subject positions of being heard as insistent or as problems were articulated when trying to bring gender into view. When contemplating public service as a discursive institution and the responsibilities of being a public servant, the lack of sexual harassment rules and bullying rules until very late reinforces the view that public service as it is designed and practiced, is insufficiently gender-sensitive. There is a lack of rules about gender on prospective parliamentary candidates and histories of gender violence. During the ethnography, prospective parliamentary candidates attended events around the Westminster area. Therefore, to explore parliamentary candidates is not necessarily exogenous to parliament, as several are already heavily connected to the settings and people. Using Butler's performativity argument, rules can become 'about gender' performatively when certain actors take the lead, even if white males might be beneficiaries as well.

'Rules with Gendered Effects' in the UK House of Commons
Parliaments are not static and long-term democratic changes within parliaments, their empowerment, and the types of functions that they prioritise may create qualitatively different and shifting gender arrangements. Parliaments are always reforming and strengthening-though not irreversibly and consistently (Kelso, 2009), as political actors institute changes to make parliaments work in a more democratic and effective way. The Wright reforms as new rules recalibrated gender relations both positively and negatively. The House of Commons is arguably different from several other workplaces, since MPs have to vote on several leadership positions at the beginning of the parliament, but also throughout the parliament as chairs become vacant. Following O'Brien's observation that newly elected MPs in particular may work in low information environment, even in by-elections to committee chair positions, the performance of gender matters in these dynamics, especially when there is a new intake, since MPs must make decisions very quickly-and even after four years into the parliamentary session. This coincides with a culture that laid emphasis on 'rating'. Schemes of recognition then in a Butlerian sense who gets noticed for their work is important. Chapter 5 also showed a lack of rules with gendered effects, for example the lack of a job description. In place of this, MPs used discourses between/with/against workplaces, for example meeting the desire for 'uncomplaining labour', performed through gendered meanings of belligerence, strength and embodied stewardship. Covid 19 may change ideas about embodied stewardship and presentism, notwithstanding that embodied contact in informal spaces in parliament is also imporant. Chapter 6 examined the governance of the House reforms and how gender was ignored as a salient category of analysis but the candidate, Carol Mills was simultaneously situated as a gendered subject. I propose that had gender been treated as a salient category of analysis, there may have been more robust reform of these governance arrangements. The treatment of Mills matters, since she was cast as 'other' through her accent, nationality and social distance from cricket metaphors. The replacement of the Clerk of the House could have catalysed democratic linkage with those who may seek a non-partisan engagement with parliament (Müller and Sieberer 2014, pp. 324-325), but instead it was characterised by intra-institutional fights. Objective 2 of the House of Commons and Parliamentary Digital Service D and I Strategy 2019-2022 is to involve and inspire the public. Paul Evans, a clerk of parliaments, critically contemplates the 'rules of the game' by critiquing instances when the House's deliberations over procedure may 'fail to engage their [the public's] interests and emotions or earn their confidence -to appear human ' (2018, p. 18). Parliaments as gendered workplaces are irrevocably linked to gendered skills regimes of the wider population and therefore this episode could have been responsive to this.
Chapter 7 explored parliamentary researchers and showed that in the absence of rules around recruitment and misconduct or insufficient rules, then Hochschild's 'feeling rules' were a subjective replacement (2012) and some researchers held onto hyper-vigilance with regard to socialising and who they could be seen with on the parliamentary estate. The issue of citizenship was particularly acute for parliamentary researchers, since the need to network and to establish contacts was pertinent. Furthermore, norms of drinking and social media hailed researchers in as parliamentary citizens which could be exclusionary.

'Gendered Actors Working with the Rules' in the UK House of Commons
This book makes an original and distinctive contribution by looking more closely at the gendered actors who work with the rules-how they think of and experience their everyday life at parliament. The book not only provided a descriptive picture of gendered actors in the House of Commons in Chapter 3, but has also explored the interpellative fabric of parliaments-that is, how parliamentary actors are 'called' into gendered subject positions everyday. Actors are hailed in relationships and bodies are differentially supported by institutional architecture. A key argument in this book is that we need to consider the spectral nature of parliamentary actors, for example some journalists and those actors who make regular citations to elected politicians' identities through providing research and recognition and how gender relations are upheld by this arrangement. We know from conceptual discussions in Chapter 2 that MPs rely on staff for their identity as an office-holder because they help them to successfully complete tasks. The book sought to examine the models and channels of communication between these worlds that links them together-such as the domestic committees, WENs and harassment rules. The domestic committees provide a key conduit between MPs and the House Service and so are important for internal communications. The interdependency of parliamentary actors working in the UK House of Commons, as outlined in Chapter 3, was vivid in the fieldwork.
When looking at the House of Commons as a gendered institution, we can see that gender is in struggle. Gendered consciousness and a recurring gender binary evoking categories of 'men' and 'women' as hierarchical groups derived from their numbers was prescient in the House of Commons-symbolic representation was derived from descriptive representation. An example is women 'firsts' and the perception of 'male arrogance' on select committees, as well as the place 'feeling very male'. However, there was also some symbolic discussion such as female researchers contending with 'that secretary image'. As Butler suggests: The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much of the script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again. (Butler 1988, p. 526) As mentioned in Chapter 2, recent institutionalist work attends to 'actors with real human heads and hearts, who engage critically and strategically with institutions rather than simply playing pre-assigned roles' (Lowndes and Roberts 2013, p. 145 emphasis added). When exploring gendered actors working with the rules, the book has argued that subjectivities, identifications and affects are key to understanding gendered actors working with the rules and how they might have an ambivalent or ambiguous relationship to them. As mentioned, the disagreement over Carol Mills' appointment provided an interesting lens into the affective culture of the House, tieing together the working worlds outlined in Chapter 3 with repeated rounds of conflict between the Speaker, staff and MPs. Furthermore, struggles around this rule change showed that affects, such as embarrassment could be mobilised as a sanction in the form of discourses of governance and intervention. The episode showed, arguably, how more proximate personifications of gendered actors could disguise rules with gendered effects, such as the hierarchicalisation of skills regimes in career structures in the House.
Feminist discursive institutionalists suggest that actors' desires, preferences and interests are constituted by institutions rather than pre-existing them; therefore, it may be necessary to probe this interaction further.
Subjectivities of accomplishment and affective resonance with like-minded people may prohibit change, as one parliamentary researcher told me 'you're made to feel like you've done well here 1 '. Puwar suggested '[t]o be in a career, you have already been part and parcel of the practice of endorsement' (Puwar 2004, p. 121). Therefore, a critical discursive politics might involve questioning passionate attachments, or drawing on less subordinating modes of attachment. The targets of desire are also notable. In the select committee, it was felt that men directed their attention towards showing off to other men. This supports Martin's analysis of homosocial behaviour (2004) but also expands and further genders Rai's discussion of who the audience of a performance might be (2014). Furthermore, MPs have little training as employers and so beneath this lack of training the career for parliamentary researchers is affectively managed around feeling rules, loyalty and jocularity. Power is performed through mutual identification and mirroring, as well as through structural power. Age, a lack of seniority and the low occupational status intersect problematically with gender.
Gendered actors working with the rules include Women's Parliamentary Organisations as arenas-for example the Workplace Equality Networks. WENs are political because they are declaratory: that inequalities exist. WENs provide recognition, mutuality and the activities can have excitable effects, such as activism in parliaments. There are a number of benefits to WENs but at the time of fieldwork, gendered actors with the rules faced informal resistances, such as being seen as 'wishy-washy' and the need to ideally retain the separation of WENs from management in order to be able to hold management to account fully. The WENs provide a space where members can bring themselves to work, rather than being 'undone' by their institutional positions. It will be interesting longitudinally to see how WENs conceive of themselves fitting in and acting with/in the parliament. This has been seen as a positive development; however, they need maintenance.

How Does Ethnography Help Us to Explore This?
This book has overall provided a thicker empirical discussion of gendering beneath the spectacle in the UK House of Commons. The book contributed to intra-methodological discussion on the different types of ethnographies that can be conducted to answer research questions on gender and parliaments and what is at stake when we select a framework (see Miller 2020). As mentioned in Chapter 2, anthropologists had a chilly reaction to institutionalism, though not necessarily feminist institutionalism. This is worth reflecting on, since the analytical choices when conducting an ethnography are consequential. Notwithstanding this, I now discuss how ethnography can be a particularly powerful pairing with feminist institutionalism. In terms of exploring rules about gender, ethnography can facilitate trust building to discuss informal rules about gender, such as the reduced to two post rule and the informal office rules to navigate an institutional environment. Situated observations can also explore the reception and mood of the creation of rules about gender, such as whether institutional actors feel that an intervention is a publicity stunt for the symbolic representation of the parliament, or for a certain office to show leadership. Parliamentary ethnography also allows us to see how a rule can become about gender when institutional actors take ownership of it. Furthermore, to institute is what Ahmed calls a 'sweaty' (2017, p. 13) verb and parliamentary ethnography allows us to enter into a more fine-grained study of the struggles around instituting these rules.
In terms of rules with gendered effects, parliamentary ethnography allows researchers to see how interpellations of gender may occur in rules not about gender, for example discussing how being 'circulatable' might be embodied in the parliament. Furthermore, when examining rules with gendered effects, ethnography allows the researcher to submit their own body to see if their own gender identity has an effect on the rules existing, such as the pass system. It also allows researchers to analyse categories of masculinities and femininities that help to endogenise rule changes or to subvert formal rule changes and how parliamentary actors experience rule changes on the ground.
In terms of gendered actors working with the rules, parliamentary ethnography provides us with a thicker picture of the actors at the capillaries who are 'interminably spectral' (Butler 2004, p. 34) and who may not be made immediately known from an interview study. Chapter 6 sought to show the actors, content, and the processes through which WEN members seek to act for gendered members of staff. The book joins scholars (Schumann 2009;Crewe 2015; Judge and Leston Bandeira 2018; Crewe and Sarra 2019; Geddes 2019) who have situated parliamentary and political actors in multiple arrangements and relationships to each other. Doing parliamentary studies differently and beneath the mainstream would also involve speaking with cleaners, and those who are on the very lowest pay grades and who also work anti-social hours. Parliamentary researchers and caseworkers in the constituency, for example, have been found to have an informal role in bringing people through the parliamentary structures such as interns and volunteers. These then are key actors in terms of recruitment and supply of parliamentary staff. They are also important actors for public service, since develop formal and tacit classification systems to handle casework. In terms of research, this demands a closer in-depth examination of these actors. Indeed, often these actors are mistakenly placed as a constitutive outside of MPs as those bodies that do not 'matter' (Butler 2011). How they understand and perform gender and power and the categories of men, women, masculinities and femininities that are operative in the UK House of Commons matters. Ethnography can be perspective transforming in understanding how parliaments are gendered, by putting familiar disciplinary concepts under scrutiny in applied practice. Ethnography allows us to write the body into parliamentary studies. If gender is conceptualised as a 'stylised repetition of acts through time' (Butler 1988, p. 520, emphasis added), then time spent with these parliamentary actors matters. Ethnography is also helpful to elicit power and responsibility by turning the gaze upwards to those who escape scrutiny (Nader 1972).
Although ethnography can provide a thicker analysis, it is not comprehensive and is always contingent on the positionality of the researcher and the access achieved. The empirical chapters did not cover the performative acts, rules and practices of the career cycle, citizenship or public service, in their entirety. Different access would inevitably have shown more heterogeneity in these working worlds. The presentation of the fieldwork in each chapter is not strictly symmetrical; therefore, further research could be undertaken in order to make a qualitatively richer comparison of the terms of arrangements in and between these working worlds.

How Do Political Actors Respond and What Are the Opportunities for Change?
Institutions can be re-gendered (Beckwith 2005), but how? Following Bacchi (2017), this section contributes conceptually to what it might mean to undo gender in some practices and what this might mean. Regendering in this book means to undo fixed categories of 'men' and 'women'; to allow more plural ways of performing masculinities and femininities; and for them not to be valued in hierarchical binaries. The workplace perspective developed in this book took a threefold analysis of the institutions that order the everyday in the UK House of Commons: the career cycle, citizenship and public service. Parliamentary actors have to engage with these discursive institutions in order to make institutional life 'workable' (Tyler 2019) and they are hung together by a range of gender performances.
What room do parliamentary actors have to resist, or recalibrate the rules of the game and how can change come about? Endogenous change in parliament requires the development and negotiation of knowledge claims and practices within parliament, as well as learning how the institution works (Berthet 2019). Feminist work can push for direct changes as well as more diffuse, discursive contributions (Childs and Dahlerup 2018). Feminist discursive institutionalism suggests that change might be identity-contingent. Certain actors in their performances are more empowered to pursue change. As shown in Chapter 6, securing change may involve a power struggle (Celis and Lovenduski 2018). If parliament is to be addressed as a gendered workplace, then we know that institutions are 'not monolithically resistant to gender' (Mergaert and Lombardo 2014). As mentioned, feminist discursive institutionalist approaches seek to bring the actor back in and to have a relational conception of gender (Friedenvall and Krook 2011). Both material and discursive change is needed. Drawing on the analytical framework presented in Chapter 2, I will now pose at least five entry points for change. Four of the entry points (1, 2, 4 and 5) are discursive and one (3) is material ( Fig. 8.1).

Level 1 and 2: Troubling the UK House of Commons' Contingent Foundations
The first type of Butlerian change considers the big 'why' questions-that means questioning what passes as 'necessary and unalterable' (Tyler 2019, p. 2). Butler's project of politicising 'contingent foundations' (1995) is a key form of agency. This involves dislodging 'mundane rituals of truth'that is, questioning the norms and ways of working that enjoy presumptive common-sense status in the UK House of Commons. In some senses, these big questions indeed have come about through endogenous shocks. In the UK Parliament, rapid change has been narrated as difficult due to the 'small c' conservative British Political Tradition. We know that parliaments are multi-functional bodies and stress different functions at certain times (Kreppel, 2014;Abels 2020). The 'mainstays of parliamentary reform' are the select committee structure, Lords reform and the repeatedly unearthed question of whether to write a constitution, but other reforms could be considered beyond the usual shopping list. An example is asking why, for example voting has to be done in person? Feminist institutionalists see the separation between exogenous and endogenous change (Lowndes 2019) as untenable. Contingent foundations could be understood through comparative parliamentary studies to explore best practice elsewhere. Such practices are noted in IPU's innovation tracker that shows there is not an inevitability of rules and practices being performed in the same way. There are four opportunity structures. Firstly, it may be easier to gain support for a new framing of an issue, rather than for rule change (Erikson 2019). Parliaments as workplaces and parliamentary workers as a subject position through which to fight inequalities and cut through the disenchantment with UK politics, appears in some senses to be a felicitous frame. Other scholars suggest such discourses can alleviate the gaps between citizens and parliamentarians (Busby 2013). The UK House of Commons could potentially occupy a leading and symbolic role in how a workplace should operate. A workplace approach is not uncontentious: legislatures should be recognised as 'an institution that wields substantial power, authoritatively allocates vast resources, and sets the boundaries for many key values such as those associated with civil rights…[A workplace] approach under-estimates the coercive power of law-making bodies' (Duerst-Lahti 2002, p. 371), and indeed, parliaments nest political parties and their relations of antagonism and agonism.
Media discourses and public opinion after #MeToo did, in some ways, interpellate the House of Commons into accountability discourses as an employer, not least from the three QCs who were commissioned to investigate the working cultures but as such, these hails have not as yet proven to be transformative-or caused significant 'trouble' for power regimes. For example, allegations continue to emerge of sexual harassment. This is despite clear public support for reform (Culhane 2019). The Women's Equality Party stood parliamentary candidates in seats of MPs who had been accused of sexual harassment. This subverts power's narrative because it holds the candidates accountable. Civil Society Organisations have written letters in support of victims. It is yet to see how far issues of race and ethnicity will become addressed in parliaments, following the increased visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Secondly, COVID-19 has led to rapidly changing parliamentary workplaces worldwide and may indeed be a catalyst for change, especially as it shifts the staffing arrangements to support parliaments. Parliaments have had to be agile to allow shielding MPs and vulnerable staff to work from home. Parliamentary actors have been challenged to craft responses that fulfils representation, policy-making, linkage, oversight, care of the workforce and leadership on gender equality. The move to the hybrid parliament has raised questions about what the 'functions' of parliaments might be and how these are practiced everyday. COVID-19 may improve techniques for public engagement, since select committees before did not take so much video evidence, and allows witnesses to participate from around the country in the comfort of their own homesthough the emphasis on facial expressions through digital evidence may be even greater.
Thirdly, a permissive discursive opportunity-though was more volatile and short-lived-was in 2019; when the UK Parliament was unlawfully prorogued. There were internal conflicts about how to defend an imperfect institution-and from a gender lens, an unease with a de facto defence of this institution. Therefore, parliament needs reforming, in order to be able to count on groups defending it against executive power and the distinction between parliament and the executive should be better communicated. It was also notable that the Speaker upon return to Parliament on 25th September 2019 said: 'colleagues, welcome back to our place of work'. 2 Therefore, the workplace frame can be invoked in moral terms and strategically, but this discourse can also be used regressively, such as the initial decision to require shielding MPs to vote in person during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, there is the restoration and renewal project, whereby change can occur to make the parliament more inclusive since as the empirical chapters demonstrate, gender performances occur within and through space (Childs 2016;Cotter and Flinders 2019); however, renewal will be embedded in historical discourses of the 'debating parliament' perhaps conceived very narrowly. The fire at Notre Dame cathedral in 2019 was perhaps a reminder that urgent change needed to be made to the physical structures of the parliamentary workplace. However, as Chapters 5 and 6 show in relation to the Debate Artwork in the select committee room and Portcullis House, there inevitably becomes a gap between conceived space and lived space-spaces can be performed differently from their original design. In terms of rules about gender, a recommendation was made in the Gender-Sensitive UK Parliament Audit that Erskine May should have a chapter on gender-sensitivity. This would be a reflexive exercise for both the clerks engaged in the writing process and those who engage with parliamentary procedure. There has been some discursive reforms linked to sex and descriptive representation such as the standing orders.

Level 3-Changing the Rules-In-Form and Rules-In-Use of the UK House of Commons
Further rules about gender for institutional change may include compulsory intersectional trainings in parliaments. Innovative feminist pedagogies allow parliamentary actors, to reflect on the opacity of themselves and their relative privileges. As the chapters show, institutions are held together affectively. A fragility exists around discussing liberal complicity in promulgating inequality-especially in parliaments that are ostensibly 'other-regarding' environments of public service. If affect is a medium of non-discussion then critical race pedagogy shows us how parliamentary actors can be a 'good' person but also unconsciously sexist, racist and cause harm by reproducing structures, so learning from behaviour is not an attack on someone's whole character and a good/bad binary should be deconstructed whilst at the same time resolving to learn from behaviour and change institutional arrangements (Diangelo 2018). Resistances to trainings include pre-empting hostile media coverage of the cost, the presumption of incomprehension and uncertainty and necessity of trainings; that it interferes with mandates; and that it implies a lack of 'common sense'.
In terms of rules with gendered effects, old institutional changes have been appealed to change the tone of the debate such as a separation of powers (Hardman 2018) so that Ministers are not chosen from their floor performances and are less incentivised to make partisan attacks. Increasing the powers of parliament to create behavioural change was also cited during the Wright Reforms. However, patriarchy and misogyny must be considered in order to investigate whether parliamentary actors participate in these structures on equal terms. There has been an ongoing suggestion to create a House Business Committee. This was in the Coalition Agreement, but was shelved and majority governments came in. If this committee does ever come into fruition, it will be notable to see how gender is operated in its creation and priorities.
For the House Service, there are periodic reviews of the governance structures and so it can be assessed how well the new structures bedded in and whether employees in the whole of the administration felt their careers were supported. The status inversion practices through reverse mentoring schemes could be more widespread. There have also been discussions about how far graduate employment is needed in the House Service.
Overall, when making rule changes, it is important to consider that parliaments are not untethered from political economy and (societal) structures (Rai and Spary 2019; Lowndes 2019; Goodwin et al. 2020). It is important to embed Parliament within non-parliamentary institutions such as the education system and indeed the union societies of Oxbridge and Russell Group Universities that dominate. For parliamentary researchers, 'parliamentary experience' is a pre-requisite of working for an MP, because of the need to start quickly. There could be greater reflection on what a meritocracy for this position might look like and whether such skills of drafting and consuming parliamentary materials such as press-releases, oral and written parliamentary questions, as well as scenarios such as if an MP wants to secure a backbench business debate, or has been assigned to a committee, could be taught exogenously in schools. This could be paid for by IPSA and provided by extant parliamentary researchers. Rule change may involve inter-institutional articulations of institutions and geography, such as empowering local government and moving parliament's institutions beyond London. This may change as a result of Covid 19 and the temporarily increased visibility of Metro Mayors and local government in performing crisis leadership. When considering rule change, Parliament should be more transparent for academic researchers too. It was difficult during the fieldwork, for example to access staff surveys from each year, and much information was gleaned through freedom of information requests.
In terms of gendered actors working with the rules, more resources could be given to institutionalise Women's Parliamentary Organisations such as Workplace Equality Networks and the All Party Parliamentary Group for Women in Parliament. There are some informal arrangements such as MAPSA who can lobby for access to a Chief Whip. The Labour Party Women's PLP may also be a key player.
In terms of men's participation discussed in Chapter 5, because a key tenet of feminist discursive institutionalism is that change is identity-contingent, men may have greater influence through their subject positions. Furthermore, they should share in the labour of bringing about gender equality. However, ally discourse invoking male capability and female vulnerability is problematic if only white middle class males take leadership of ameliorating inequalities. 3 Allies discourse can rest on a binary of zero-sum power and 'good' men-and some women giving up their primary power, levelling down and having a 'pedestal effect' that needs to be matched with accountability (Messner et al. 2015, p. 135). In terms of bystander intervention, reputational damage amongst peers replaced formal sanctions but self-regulation relies on a group having 'fairly homogenous values' that is unlikely in a legislature (David-Barrett 2015, pp. 523-524). It also builds into the notion of a logic of iterability in Chapter 2 that gendered actors working with the rules, such as male allies, may not consistently act in 'feminist' waysand that gender-equal improvements are plural and contested. Whilst the energy of 'commitment carriers' (Ahmed 2012, p. 130) is valuable; with weak institutionalisation, gender equality is vulnerable to reversal (Goetz 2003, p. 59).
We know from feminist institutionalism and organisational studies that rule-based change is not always straight forward, for at least five reasons. These are: (1) rule change might require a more discursively felicitous and 'permissive opportunity' for institutional change, such as an election of a post, where candidates can be lobbied for change or governance reviews and might be abandoned in turbulent times; (2) there may be a recalcitrance and resistances to institutional interventions and training (Mergaert and Lombardo 2014); (3) actors might not have the material coercion, occupy the right subject position or have political influence to bring about rule change; (4) rule change and leaning into the institution assumes shared normative values; and (5) if there is a rule, it then becomes incumbent on weakly positioned parliamentary actors to make use of it-institutional responsibility can be seen to stop there.

Level 4 Everyday Performances in the UK House of Commons
How can political actors respond to their multiple subject positionings in parliamentary working life, and how does this shape opportunities for re-gendering parliaments? In some parliaments, parliamentary actors as 'insiders' have mobilised for change, using their knowledge of the institution (Berthet 2019). Given the constraints for rule change outlined in the previous section, opportunities for change then may for some be immanent within and against the grain of the institutional structure in smaller actions. Butler notes that: power is not stable or static, but is remade at various junctures within everyday life; it constitutes our tenuous sense of common sense, and is ensconced as the prevailing epistemes of a culture. Moreover, social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous or subversive practices. (2000, p. 14) Everyday life in parliaments is a space of both normativity and difference. However, this requires attention to the contributions and limitations of a conception of agency connected with the performativity of gender. The contributions and opportunities are that because parliamentary actors are multiply positioned, there are multiple subject positions to seek change from, in the career cycle, citizenship or public service. Butler mirrors a bricoleur conception of change and argues that: '[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the "taking up" is enabled by the tool lying there ' (2007, p. 199). Change then may occur through several acts and practices, rather than singularly as a critical juncture. Parliamentary actors' agency is not found outside the discourses and performative supports of the career cycle, citizenship and public service but in the ability to repeat them differently and symbolically. This relates to the critical acts literature by being necessarily opposed to it but raises questions of feminist consciousness, elsewhere as liminal acts.
The limitations are, firstly, that resistance is identity-contingent and might reify the agency of weaker actors, relying on them to solve structural problems. Speaking out, for example, requires iterative practice to become more confident each time and bring subjectivities into being-or muscle memory to use a fleshy embodied metaphor. This does not nullify the type of agency, but might require reflection on how one can advocate with/for others. Indeed, as Butler suggests: [I]f I were to argue that genders are performative, that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night. Such a wilful and instrumental subject, one who decides on its gender, is clearly not its gender from the start and fails to realize that its existence is already decided by its gender. (2011, p. ix) Table 8.1 details a thicker exploration of the interactive relationships with rules and the performance of subject positionings. Some tactics that were emic from the field and etic from literature can be used immanently to move across from different subject positionings and be signified differently as well as undoing power centres. These are only speculative and many different articulations could be more subversively performed.
It has been suggested that the everyday may be a place that lacks reflection. Furthermore, repetition of critical, or rather liminal acts, might reduce their politicisation as well as strengthening and naturalising them. Finally, the career cycle certainly for low-income and precarious actors has more immediate material effects and possible sanctions for speaking out cannot be ignored. • Speaking at meetings, taking up more space, sitting at the front and centre • Asking minorities, juniors and women first for input and amplifying their good ideas • Publicly acknowledging others' contributions • Making career and life references from experiences that are exogenous to the parliament • Sitting in between men at meetings, if it is safe to do so, and breaking up circles in male networks. Inserting oneself into hierarchies, insinuating oneself into others' worlds • Humour as resisting power's narrative (Rai 2014(Rai , p. 1187 • Imagery, such as rolling out a chair from underneath a meeting table, to find a baby seat there • Laughter as a distancing tactic • Sharing resources • MPs could answer the phone, visit their teams at their desks and perform some tasks practised by staff (continued) • Choosing how to present/absent oneself in parliamentary space • Planning socials, rather than having them ad hoc, so that everyone can join • Using social media to make parliament and the power relations more accessible • Side-stepping comments, not being able to be drawn into discourses Public Service • Spatialising tactics-avoiding the total institution. This is difficult when parliamentary actors move to London • Creating a narrative for oneself with the help of others to make sense of what has happened, actors' achievements and values • Boring harassers who make approaches, if it is safe to do so • Asking the political actor to repeat comment for them to hear and assess the logic of it • The use of absurdity to express a view of unequal institutional arrangements

Level 5: Knowledge Change
The final form of change discussed here is change based around knowledge practices and claims making. To return to the discussion about the WENs in Chapter 6, Butler asked how we can 'shatter the epistemic blindness' of gender inequality, by naming inequalities and making them visible (Butler 2011, p. 178). The book raises clear questions about intentionality, agency, sentience, unconscious bias and political will. If parliaments are not passive actors but are sites for politicisation, then power/knowledge should be investigated. Furthermore, knowledge change for broader actors on the estate is important, so that agency is not reduced to sympathetic discussions in private between those who are already conscious of gender inequalities. Two participants from the House Service suggested that 'hearts and minds 4 ' change needed to accompany formal policy. Knowledge change is important. Designing new regulations has to be accompanied by work to build and embed some shared normative commitments and new discursive frames. However, there is a thorny question of whether actors know and whether there is an institutional will not to acknowledge-an institutionalised wilful ignorance, or whether parliamentary actors are genuinely unaware of their actions. This shares similarities with creating a culture of women's interests and spaces, but this can include gender equality. It also shares similarities with very traditional approaches, such as the 'informing' function of parliamentswhereby parliamentary actors are disposed to knowledges that they are not ordinarily (Bagehot 2003) and shape knowledge and practice. Knowledge practices are already occurring such as record keeping of diversity data, for example select committee witnesses as mentioned in Chapter 7. Indeed, IPU, the Good Parliament Report (2016), EIGE and UN women all provide toolkits on how to make parliaments more gender equal. The reports by both Dame Laura Cox QC and Gemma White QC also provide knowledge on the culture of the House of Commons as a workplace. The very exercise of a self-assessment tool can stimulate discussion. The House of Commons Service does participate in some indices, such as Stonewall Equalities Index though indices and external benchmarks but it cannot tell us what is happening beneath and between what is captured in these. It is also important to assess where knowledge claims and analyses of protected characteristics are not integrated as analytical categories. ParliREACH suggests: 'People were seen to be much more comfortable discussing protected characteristics such as disability, sexuality or gender than they were discussing race' (2019, p. 3). Furthermore, broader structural knowledges could be advanced. For example, bullying needs to be seen in broader structural racist contexts (Palmer 2019). Furthermore, 'gendered change is often initiated by feminist actors who have engaged with new gendered ideas' (Erikson 2019, p. 27), therefore links to the women's movement and broader social movements could be fostered even more.
In terms of gendered actors working with the rules, key engines or critical actors with specialist knowledge are the Workplace Equality Networks; the Women and Equalities Select Committee; library subject specialists; and the POST office-to help with knowledge change. It is important to assess how far these actors discursively and materially have status in the parliament (Ahrens 2016). Likewise, if foreclosure, occurs and actors and knowledges deemed not to matter, is reiterated, then a feminist discursive institutionalist approach explores these foreclosures over time. Actors could also do follow ups to find out about people's experiences of who engages with parliament. A duty of care as a corporate body during recruitment to select committee witness, to the position of parliamentary researcher, or to posts in the House may be an aspect of gender-sensitivity.
Feminist discursive institutionalism read as/with performativity moves from iterative gender performances to performative-to explore what work gender 'does' in everyday power struggles in the House of Commons-that is, the movement from gender as an analytical category, to gender as a process (Beckwith, 2005). These performativities or materialisations may be collective feelings, policy regimes and some careers sustained over others, orders and patterns in the House of Commons the performative of 'what discourses can 'do' in political life' (Friedenvall and Krook 2011, p. 48). When looking at what discourses do, parliaments' outward societal links should be considered. Butler argues that there is 'a life to discourse that exceeds the subject's own temporality' (Butler and Bell 1999, p. 166). The implications of Butler's conception of inheritance and citation of discourse (1997) and her 'logic of iterability ' (2011, p. 69) provide pregnant ground for considering gendered legislative ethics, the promulgation of affects, and discursive responsibility. Butler suggests: the citationality of discourse can work to enhance and intensify our sense of responsibility for it. The one who utters hate speech is responsible for the manner in which such speech is repeated, for reinvigorating such speech, for reestablishing contexts of hate and injury… Responsibility is thus linked with speech as repetition, not as origination. (Butler 1997, pp. 27, 39).
A wider notion of discursive responsibility is iterated over Butler's accounts (2005). To be sure, discursive responsibility does not entail bringing people into shared norms, whilst this may be desirable. Rather than accountability as responding to external directives only, for Butler, responsibility might be achieved in subjectivity too, through knowing one's speech could be excitable and re-cited by others, as well as an understanding of co-professionalism or: 'power with' (Allen 1998). Furthermore, the actions of sets of actors and leaders in parliament bear relevance for others and so the promulgation of affective atmospheres and their material effects has become a matter of concern.
Emphasis can be placed on a non-instrumental will to knowledge in how discourse 'matters'. This undertaking may involve disciplinary expertise from linguists, affect theorists, violence in politics researchers, combined with women's Civil Society Organisations to chart plausible transitions between rhetoric and action, for example sharp rhetoric, the cultivation of affective atmospheres, death threats citing similar language to that expressed in the chamber, and the assassination of an MP and how those minorities who enter parliaments or any workplaces become embroiled in a discursive web, woven by others-they become bearers of institutional legacies that preceded them.
The second way that FDI might look at the performative could be the link between institutional practices, contestations over gender, and policy regimes. Whilst a substantive analysis of policies was not undertaken in this study, the book concludes that a will to knowledge of parliament's own workplace practices may be fruitful for policy development and the conferral of recognition of and redistribution in response to inequalities in the contemporary workplace. It is true that most legislation is drafted in Whitehall, but parliamentarians can have impact through various means: EDMs, select committees, debates and private members bills (Russell and Gover 2017). When gendered policies have been investigated from an institutional perspective, it has been from the perspective of institutions as obstructing critical actors in practical terms (Annesley and Gains 2010), rather than institutional behaviours as affecting knowledge practices to then represent these interests. A vivid link between power/knowledge is the UK's sexual harassment policy regime. In 2011, third-party harassment was removed from the Equalities Act 2010 by the coalition government, but this practice was arguably happening daily in the UK Parliament. Since #MeToo, harassment has been taken up in Select Committee Inquiries on: (1) sexual harassment in the workplace; (2) sexual harassment of women and girls in public spaces; and (3) nondisclosure agreements on discrimination cases. Third-party harassment is something that has been indirectly alluded to in the behavioural code which applies to visitors who visited the estate. Furthermore, given the fieldwork experiences and how class was foregrounded in the field, then this begs the question of how the Socio-Economic Duty also did not come to be implemented in the Equalities Act 2010 and socio-economic background is not a protected characteristic. Some scholars have yielded meaningful linkages and have put conceptual stepping stones in place to explore this connection (Bedford 2009

What Does a Feminist Discursive Institutionalist Approach to Parliaments Look like?
Recent work in the field of feminist institutionalism has made important progress in furthering our understanding of gender and institutions (Krook and Mackay 2011;Waylen 2017). However, this book fleshes out this body of research by exploring more fully how identity-building practices are political. Power inheres in identities and they are both structurally and organisationally arranged. Whilst feminist institutionalism has made important steps to understand how institutions are gendered, at present, identity is too under-developed in feminist institutionalist literature. Whilst networks, resources and rules are important, it cannot tell us about lookism, or peer on peer harassment by colleagues who are ostensibly at the same organisational level. A feminist discursive institutionalist approach stresses that professional identity is not an extension of the person, but something that is socially instituted. It shows that people's identities matter in a way that people are situated unequally in relation to networks and resources. A general approach to power does not engage with material specificities of the bodies of different men and women. This is not to disregard the important work that has come before, but moves its empirical focus more firmly towards these ends.
This book joins the exciting frontier of more interpretive approaches to parliaments (Leston-Banderia 2016; Crewe 2015; Rai and Spary 2019; Geddes 2019). Using Burke's distinction between 'thick' and 'thin' performances in Chapter 2, I moved away from perhaps thicker 'symbolic' and ceremonial performances towards 'thinner' everyday conception of performance. The book has also attempted to get at subject formation closer, through the concept of undoing. It also explores actors' relationships with each other. This book has looked more closely at the acts that build a workplace and through which gender is performed. FDI can still incorporate claims making in the ways 'which rules unfold' (Rai and Spary 2019, p. 15). Gender is more complex and iterative. Feminist discursive institutionalism explores even more closely how institutional situations require different performative acts. It also joins scholars who are developing more symbolic-discursive analyses of parliaments (Galligan and Meier 2016). This was not a systematically intersectional analysis, but given the clear class and race inequalities that are entrenched in this book and intersect with gender (Puwar 2004), then more focused interventions are needed.
This book has read feminist discursive institutionalism with/as performativity, fleshing out both analytical frameworks with an empirical focus on the everyday, derived from ethnographic research of the UK House of Commons. Gender performativity is 'not a singular "act"' but is ritualised in the compulsory repetition of norms' (Butler 2011, p. xxi). There is an emerging movement of scholars who see Butler's questions as 'profoundly organizational questions' (Tyler 2019) since Butler has been moving across to study the labour market and precarious labour (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). I would add that these are profoundly parliamentary questions too-especially given her focus on assembly (2015). This book joins scholars who have sought to read Butler as a theorist of organisation (Tyler 2019;Rai and Spary 2019) to ameliorate the gap where political science has been untroubled by Butler's work (Smith and Lee 2015). Butler's themes of recognition, power and organisation are accentuated in elite workplaces, such as parliaments that are mediatised, and attract both horizontal and vertical spectatorships. In sum, Butler provides a more fine-grained study of power that inheres in conferrals of recognition in and by institutions, through concepts such as descriptive marks and gesture, performative efficacy and a logic of iterability. It adds to more interpretivist conceptions of parliamentary studies, by exploring everyday 'acts' of gender. Discursive institutionalism so far has looked more at policy debates, rather than practices (Friedenvall andKrook 2011, cf. Berthet andKantola 2020) and this adds to how identities are mobilised around practices in parliaments.
Finally, to conduct an analysis of the genderedness of parliaments, a feminist discursive institutionalism also looks at how parliaments are articulated with other institutions, assessing not only their relationships, but learning from alternative practices, be they caring institutions, social movements, worldwide parliaments, or local and sub-national political structures such as local councils.

Generalisability to Other Parliaments
UK parliamentary studies was until recently criticised for being methodologically nationalist (Judge 1983). In terms of the generalisability of the approach taken to other parliaments, on the one hand the book opens up exciting insights for a whole host of issues within and beyond the purview of the UK Parliament. However, on the other hand, different parliamentary systems may nest different types of parliamentary administrations, career opportunities, party competition, concepts of gender, histories, behavioural norms and practices and indeed gendered actors who work with the rules. The House of Commons as a debating parliament puts priority on different actors, officers and departments of the House. Furthermore, intersectional inequalities may travel differently between parliaments.
In terms of the career cycle, because the House of Commons is a debating parliament, rather than a working parliament (Lord 2018), this makes everyday tasks in the career cycle qualitatively different. This affects staffing, careers and administrative arrangements. Committee membership is less formalised than in other parliaments, such as the European Parliament or German Bundestag, where there are substitutes for example; however, this is changing (Liaison Committee 2019, p. 27). Unlike in other legislatures, including the German Bundestag and Scottish parliament, there is no 'committee day' or plenary free time scheduled in Westminster, in part reflecting the fact MPs commonly spend Fridays in their constituencies. Given the drive for staff mobility in other parliaments, the issues raised by the discussion of clerks circulation may be fruitful for other parliamentary administrations. The House of Commons is also a fused power system, meaning that the executive is drawn from the legislature, which alters career pathways. Furthermore, parliaments sit in different interparliamentary settings and actor constellations, affecting the range of actors to be engaged with in everyday working life.
In terms of citizenship, the UK Parliament also has a genealogy of a club, which makes citizenship take on a specific character and the MPs are present on the estate for long hours, because the government controls the floor time and so a vote can take place at short notice. Furthermore, other parliaments contain different governance arrangements for politicians to participate in, such as the quaestor system in the European Parliament. Transnational parliaments may also house different cultures and the same etic liberal framework of gender may not capture the nuances of gender in their entirety. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to parliaments and this makes the need for qualitative ethnographic research even more pertinent. I envisage even greater cooperation and the sharing of innovative practices by feminist political scientists working on parliaments as workplaces.
In terms of public service, the discussion of abuse relates to global debates about the relationship between hate speech, gender, accountability and politics. Different parliaments have different contexts such as the use of tear gas in some parliaments depending on parliament's relationship with society. There have been some comparisons of Westminster systems and gender equality (Collier and Raney 2018). Indeed, it is more common for European parliamentary administrations than for Congress to necessitate neutrality in its organisation (Pegan 2015), which may make it harder to advance discussions of gender equality, seen as 'political'. Constituency service, discussed in Chapter 5 takes on a particular specificity in UK parliamentary democracy, where there is fully developed constituency service, rather than in Nordic countries where there is constituency 'effort' rather than 'service' (Arter and Raunio 2018). In the USA, there is also a very intensive relationship with the district (Fenno 2003). In contrast to the US congress, the UK Parliament ethics architecture is a fairly recent institution and is hybrid, operated by both independent expertise and self-regulation. Furthermore, in the UK House of Commons, the Equalities Act 2010 provides a legal backing to address some inequalities, whereas other parliaments will rely on qualitatively different equalities and labour legislation.

Conclusion
To return to the central theme of the book, in order to assess how the UK House of Commons might be a gendered institution, it is important to explore different working worlds and how categories of 'men', 'women', 'masculinities' and 'femininities' are created in relation to each otherand how attendant hierarchies with material effects are reproduced. There are different working worlds in the UK House of Commons, all of which have thrown up processes that share similarities and differences: MPs are highly visible actors and the cost of making mistakes is high; parliamentary researchers are arguably present on the parliamentary estate for the longest and so citizenship becomes accentuated; whilst members of the House Service have the longest careers and so the functions of parliaments are accentuated for the career cycle. The empirical chapters have shown that gendered identity is an essential component of working life and power relations in the House of Commons. In terms of equal participation of political actors in the UK House of Commons, at the time of the fieldwork, it was suggested that some bodies were condemned to disappearance by being 'deemed not to matter'.
Change in parliaments to make them more gender equal is identitycontingent. Feminist discursive institutionalism analyses how different types of agency may be graspable to different actors. Different types of intervention are needed to make 'trouble' for these power arrangements, for situated actors. This chapter has offered four entry points for change. However, it must be foreseen that the informal can impede institutional change (Waylen 2014) and much 'work' is needed to keep reform going. Finally, the focus on discourse, identity and institutional rules, is not particularistic, but something that is shared across many professional fields and workplaces and may bring parliaments closer to citizens (Busby 2013). As such, feminists could ask productive 'parliament and/with' questions and twin this with policy change or best practice in other workplaces.