Petra Ahrens is Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland. In her fellowship she studies Finland, Germany, and Poland regarding gender-sensitive parliaments. She focuses on gender policies and politics in the European Union and its institutions, gender equality in Germany, gender-sensitive parliaments, and transnational civil society. Alongside articles, she authored Actors, Institutions, and the Making of EU Gender Equality Programs (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and with Katja Chmilewski, Sabine Lang, and Birgit Sauer Gender Equality in Politics – Implementing Party Quotas in Germany and Austria (Springer 2020), and co-edited, with Lise Rolandsen Agustín, Gendering the European Parliament. Structures, Policies, and Practices (Rowman&Littlefield/ECPR Press, 2019).

Ahrens, P, & Kantola, J (2023) Political group formation in the European parliament: Negotiating democracy and gender. Party Politics 29(5): 817-28. doi.org/10.1177/13540688221106295

Elomäki, A., & Ahrens, P. (2022). Contested gender mainstreaming in the European Parliament: political groups and committees as gatekeepers. European Journal of Politics and Gender, 5(3), 322-340.  https://doi.org/10.1332/251510822X16547712638806

Ahrens, P, Gaweda, B, & Kantola, J (2022) Reframing the language of human rights? Anti-gender and religious discourses in European Parliament debates. Journal of European Integration 44(6): 803-819. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2021.2001647.