Politics 2016, Vol. 36(1) 63–78 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1111/1467-9256.12101 pol.sagepub.com Rebecca Rumbul Cardiff University Women’s presence in politics has been much scrutinised, with emphasis primarily on electoral politics. There has been less scrutiny of those contributing to politics in a non-electoral capacity and the characteristics of such groups. The fledgling Welsh legislature has demonstrated high electoral engagement of women, and this article asks whether this electoral gender balance is mirrored in non-electoral engagement with the wider demos. The empirical evidence presented demonstrates that the representation of women in elected positions is not mirrored in the representation of women in the provision of oral evidence. This poses legitimate questions concerning the quality of Welsh democratic engagement. Keywords: representation; gender; democracy; politics; Wales Introduction The significance of gender representation in political engagement has a broad literature. However, this body of work has only a minor focus on gender representation in non-elected processes such as the provision of oral evidence to committees. This article seeks to explore the representation of women in such processes within a legislature with a high volume of elected women. It asks whether gender parity in the elected chamber is mirrored in the non-elected process of political engagement through provision of evidence to scrutiny com- mittees, and provides evidence to show that this is not occurring in the case of the devolved Welsh legislature. The National Assembly for Wales (NAfW) has an impressive record on gender equality among its elected members in the short fifteen years since its inception. The number of female Assembly Members elected during the first elections of the NAfW in 1999 accounted for 40 per cent of the chamber (24 women and 36 men) during the first Assembly period of 1999–2003. This legislature is one of only a handful of parliaments in the world that has ever achieved gender parity (achieved in the 2003 election, and rising to 51.7 per cent after a by-election in 2005) against a backdrop of historically low female political representation in Wales, with only 4 female MPs ever having been elected to Welsh constituencies in the period to 1997. In the latest elections to the Fourth Assembly (i.e. the 2011 election), the represen- tation of women fell from 46.7 per cent in the 2007–2011 Assembly, to 41.7 per cent of the total for 2011–2016. While the case for substantive and descriptive representation of women in parliaments as elected representatives has been widely discussed (Chaney, 2012; Gargarella, 1998; Mackay, Gender Inequality in Democratic Participation: Examining Oral Evidence to the National Assembly for Wales