Women are underrepresented

In 1916, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman to win election to the U.S. House. The United States led the world in this respect. Many countries elected the first women to their national legislatures in the years immediately after: Denmark in 1918, Germany in 1919, New Zealand in 1933, and so on. Yet in the century since, these and other countries have achieved greater gender balance than the United States.

As of January 2023, 124 women served in the U.S. House — 28 percent of the chamber’s members. In comparison, women comprise 40 percent of Denmark’s legislature; 35 percent of Germany’s, and 50 percent of New Zealand’s. The United States ranks 73rd in the world on this scale, just after Jamaica and Mali and tied with Lithuania.

To assess the causes, impacts, and solutions to women’s underrepresentation,[1] we must understand how it relates to the underrepresentation of people of color. Achieving fair representation for women and for people of color each involve identifying and correcting a disconnect between constituents and representatives, particularly one that reflects and reinforces broader power imbalances. The two issues have very different dynamics, however.

The underrepresentation of people of color relates directly to the ability of those communities to cast effective ballots. Winner-take-all voting rules dilute the voting power of those communities by packing them into a limited number of majority-minority districts and denying them representation across all other districts. 

This analysis does not apply to the underrepresentation of women. First, women are not a minority; they comprise just over half the population. They are also roughly evenly distributed geographically and cannot be packed into majority-women districts or systematically outvoted in majority-men districts. In aggregate, women vote differently than men, but gender-polarized voting does not exist to nearly the same extent as racially polarized voting. And gender, of course, intersects with race and ethnicity; the political challenges that white women face differ from those faced by Black, Indigenous, Latina, or AAPI women.[2]

Nonetheless, winner-take-all voting rules do impede women’s representation, just as they do for communities of color — but in different ways. The result: A less representative legislative body that is less effective for everyone and less responsive to issues of particular concern to women.

Women’s representation in the United States

From 1919, when women won the right to vote with the 19th amendment, until the 1980s, exceedingly few women won election to the U.S. House. As recently as 1987, men held nearly all (95 percent) of seats. In 1992, women made massive gains, achieving 12 percent of U.S. House seats. But progress has been slow since that storied “Year of the Woman” — a gradual incline punctuated by occasional jumps, as Figure 6 shows.

RepresentWomen, a nonprofit organization that advocates for gender balance in government, collects election rates for women across a range of elective offices and assigns a score to each state in its Gender Parity Index. Researchers conclude:

Over the past several years, we have found that, no matter how “record-breaking” a year has been for women, large representation gaps will persist across party, race, age, and geography. And so, while it is true that more women are running for office now than ever before, it is unlikely that we will achieve parity any time soon. The main lesson we’ve learned from the Gender Parity Index is that progress towards parity will be minimal, no matter how many individual women we prepare to run, unless we adopt systems strategies that can level the playing field for all women.

The breathy optimism expressed with each incremental gain in women’s representation obscures the very real ceiling on gender balance. Because women are far more likely to win office as Democrats than as Republicans, a particularly good year for women in office may in fact merely be a year in which voters favored Democrats overall. But electing more Democrats cannot be the strategy. Achieving gender balance that way would require either electing close to zero Republicans or Democrats nominating close to zero men, neither of which is an actionable goal.

Falling behind other nations

Compare progress in the U.S. House with national legislatures in other countries. In 2000, women held only 13 percent of U.S. House seats; that year, the United States ranked 48th internationally in terms of the proportion of women in its lower house. As of 2023, the United States has increased its share of women in the House to 28 percent, yet it has fallen to 73rd place worldwide. Even though U.S. women are making electoral gains, we are falling further behind other countries that are making progress faster.

The data suggest either that the hurdles facing women who run for office are higher here or that our strategies are less effective than those in other countries. Or both.

To be clear: The problem is not candidate quality.  Women sponsor and pass more bills, send more money, on average, to their districts, and provide more responsive constituent service. 

When a group is both underrepresented and overperforming, it usually means they face unfair and arbitrary barriers to success. Because men are more likely to win election than women of similar quality, women must overperform if they are to win at all. As the late Ann Richards, former governor of Texas, put it at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”[3]

Gender balance promotes better governance

Barriers to women’s representation hurt everyone. At their most basic, they deny us the productivity of the most qualified representatives; that is, they thwart our supposed meritocracy. However, the systematic underrepresentation of women does not merely exclude individuals; it diminishes the perspectives and lived experiences and struggles of an entire class of people.

Evidence suggests that women carry out the work of legislation differently than men.[4] Political scientists Craig Volden, Alan E. Wiseman, and Dana E. Wittmer found that women are significantly more likely than men to introduce bills involving the following subject matters: civil rights and liberties, education, health, housing and community development, labor/employment/immigration, law/crime/family, and social welfare. This dovetails with prior research suggesting that women have greater interest and expertise in particular issue areas than men do.

Further, issues of particular concern to women are treated less favorably than other issues in Congress today. Men and women both introduce an average of 13 bills per congress, but bills introduced by men are 50 percent more likely to see committee action and twice as likely to become law. Overall, about 4 percent of bills become law each congress, but only 2 percent of bills on the issues of particular concern to women become law.

Women’s representation is an important bellwether of democratic health in general.[5] Research shows that women are more likely to find common ground with political rivals. Countries with greater proportions of women in their legislatures tend to invest more in health and education. And women’s representation is associated with international peace: Countries with higher rates of women in their legislatures are less likely to respond to international crises with violence, face a reduced risk of civil war, and have lower levels of state-perpetrated human rights abuses.

Women are not homogenous or monolithic, but all else being equal, a legislature with better gender balance will outperform one with worse gender balance on a variety of measures. This helps explain why many countries impose minimum quotas for the number of women in their legislatures or penalize political parties that nominate too few women. The United States not only lacks these affirmative measures but also uses a political system that exaggerates bias against women, putting them at an even greater disadvantage and undermining us all.

The impact of single-winner districts on women’s representation

In the United States, the offices with the worst track records in terms of gender balance are our single-winner executive offices. As of June 2021, women are governors of only eight states and no woman has ever won the presidency; indeed, only one woman ever even received a major party nomination for that office. The head-to-head, zero-sum nature of these contests encourages harsh and negative campaign tones and easily cues gender stereotypes. It is no surprise, then, that women do worse in legislative elections when those legislative elections mimic the dynamics of executive elections.

Single-winner districts balkanize our politics, converting the election of a multi-seat body into a large number of discrete single-seat contests. To the extent that congressional districts are competitive, they are “two-party competitive,” giving them the same head-to-head, zero-sum politics of executive offices. More often, however, they are not competitive at all, allowing the current crop of incumbents, the vast majority of whom are men, to sit comfortably in safe seats.

The United States is one of 39 countries that elects exclusively from single-winner districts and lacks a gender quota system. The median proportion of women in the legislatures of such countries is a mere 15 percent. Explicit gender quotas are, unfortunately, challenging to implement in the United States, both politically and legally. When schools or other institutions have used racial or ethnic quotas, opponents have quickly construed them as just another kind of discrimination, and the federal courts have already struck down gender quotas in some state elections.[6]

Political parties, political action committees (PACs), and other actors could self-impose gender balance targets into their work, but doing so would only weakly simulate the impact of gender quotas. With genuine gender quotas out of reach, changing the electoral system becomes that much more urgent.

As described more fully in 3.4 (Better Gender Balance in Representation), women win at higher rates in places with proportional representation and in multi-winner districts in general. Evidence suggests that women also win at higher rates in places with ranked choice voting, even in single-winner districts. With winner-take-all rules in single-winner districts, we have chosen what may be the worst system possible from a gender balance perspective. If we want to achieve gender balance in this century, that must change.