Drawing on insights from state feminism and legislative studies on parliamentary committees, this article develops a dual approach for the comparative analysis of committees on gender equality. Empirically, it compares the standing committees on gender equality in Denmark and Finland, two Nordic countries acknowledged as forerunners in gender equality, which also have 'fairly strong' parliamentary standing committees. The results show that both committees on gender equality can be regarded as 'feminist' in character and both interact with relevant civil society organisations. Their impact as measured by legislative outputs and oversight differs, however, in line with differing committee system characteristics: the Finnish committee has more impact on legislative outputs while the Danish committee has more impact on overseeing government.

This article contributes to the literature on parliamentary design in general and the pioneer literature on parliamentary bodies specialized in gender equality in particular. It does so by establishing a frame for the critical assessment of the impacts of such an institutional design. Moreover, by using interviews and data on the behavior of committee members, it demonstrates the advantages of applying a mixed method within a field that has mostly relied on participant interviews. A systematic analysis of the impact of the Danish Committee on Gender Equality shows that although this particular committee has not succeeded in adding the perspective of gender equality to legislation, it has increased parliamentary control with the government. Furthermore, it has enabled much better interaction between parliament and civil society organizations.

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The concept of ‘women’s interests’ has received a large amount of scholarly attention. In particular, the problematic assumption underpinning this concept – that women share interests – has been an object of much consideration. Yet, while scholarship on the substantive representation of women has today moved free of this assumption, three other assumptions have not been scrutinised to the same degree. These are: (1) that political interests are attached to social groups; (2) that women and men have different interests; and (3) that there are only two genders. This article argues that these three assumptions are problematic for feminist scholarship on substantive representation, which warrants replacing the attached ‘women’s interests’ with an alternative interest: the unattached ‘gender equality interests’. In addition, the article sets forth three distinct ways for future studies to operationalise the substantive representation of gender equality.