Temporalités à l’épreuve de la parité

This paper seeks to shed some light on the harmonization between various social times and the temporality governing the entry of men and women into politics. It poses the question as to whether perceptions of time and temporality may be gender-specific. Depending on configurations, “going into politics” is presented as either change or continuity: novice rather than “profane”, on this occasion elected female candidates convert the “savoir-faire” acquired outside the political arena into a resource. Analyzing the perception of time reveals a gender effect on how social times work together: whereas elected male candidates do not even mention it, the majority of women in public office perceive it as problematic. Moreover, women’s position in the life course at the time of their election influences the way they experience the articulation of social times. Our approach will isolate the effects of gender but also of age in these militant trajectories, when confronting the experiences and discourses of elected officials of both sexes.