Election Briefing Series: Women in Politics

THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C. 

MODERATOR:  Hello and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center’s virtual briefing on Women in Politics.  My name is Doris Robinson and I am the briefing moderator.  Our briefer today is Diana O’Brien; she is the Bela Kornitzer Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis.  Her research and teaching focus on the – focuses on the causes and consequences of women’s political representation in high-income democracies, including Western Europe and the United States, as well as across the globe.  Her areas of study are gender and political parties, legislative and executive branch politics, as well as citizen responses to women’s presence in politics.  

And now for the ground rules.  This briefing is on the record.  We will post the transcript and a video of the briefing later today on our website at fpc.state.gov.  And a quick reminder, please make sure that your Zoom profile has your name and media outlet that you represent.  And finally, before Professor O’Brien makes opening remarks, just a quick reminder that she is an independent subject matter expert and the views expressed by briefers not affiliated with the Department of State are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.  Their participation in FPC programming does not imply endorsement, approval, or recommendation of their views.  

And with that, I will now invite Professor O’Brien to provide opening remarks.  Over to you.  

MS O’BRIEN:  Great, thank you all so much for being here today.  As an academic, part of my mission is to try to not only generate research but to share research with students and with the general public, and that’s impossible without the support of journalists.  So I’m really grateful and I’m going to do my level best to provide you with as much good content as I can about women in politics in the runup to the 2024 election.  

So my aim in my opening remarks is twofold.  So I want to provide you with an evidence-based briefing on two major themes:  So first women and men as politicians in U.S. politics, and then women and men as voters.  After the initial 15-minute presentation, I’m happy to answer questions on this topic or on a wide range of other topics.  I think I have a nice breadth of knowledge, so I’m hoping that we can do some good work together today.  

So I want to open by talking about women and men in elected office.  So if there is one thing you probably already know about gender and U.S. politics, it’s that men are significantly overrepresented in U.S. politics.  So men still make up three-quarters of governors, three-quarters of senators, three-quarters of mayors, over 70 percent of members of Congress, 67 percent of state legislators, 67 percent of municipal officeholders.   

So women are dramatically underrepresented in U.S. politics.  If we think about that in global perspective, the U.S. is right at the global mean.  So when we think about women’s representation in the House of Representatives as compared to other countries, we come in right at average.  We’re ranked 71 alongside Iraq, right below Sierra Leone, Lithuania, and Singapore; just above Colombia, Zimbabwe.   

Okay.  So probably as compared to other advanced industrialized democracies and definitely other countries in the Americas, the U.S. lags behind when it comes to women’s representation.  But a really important thing to think about here is that women’s representation in the U.S. is really a tale of two parties.  So if we break apart the Democratic and the Republican Party, we see very different trends.   

So if we look at the House of Representatives, women currently make up only 15 percent of the Republican House delegation; women make up 40 percent of the Democratic House delegation.  Women make up only 18 percent of the Republican Senate delegation; women make up 31 percent of the Democratic state delegation.  So the inequalities in women’s representation in politics are really structured by partisanship in the U.S. 

In particular, it has become increasingly important for the Democratic Party to make commitments to women – for example, representing women in cabinets.  So as you know, Biden committed when he ran in 2020 that he was going to select a woman as his vice president.  He also committed to what we call a parity, or 50/50, cabinet.  So women hold half of the cabinet positions in Biden’s cabinet, including accessing some of the most high-profile, high-prestige positions.  So for example, Janet Yellen, the first woman Secretary of the Treasury, right?  So quite prestigious.  That’s consistent with Democratic messaging since 2016.  So when Clinton ran for president, she promised that half of her cabinet would be women, and in 2020, many of the Democratic candidates said:  I’m going to have representation in the cabinet.  So this is something that the Democratic Party is strongly committed to.  

In contrast, if we look at Trump’s cabinet, only a quarter of the appointees were women, and none in high-prestige positions like Treasury, secretary of State, or Defense secretary.   

More generally in the Democratic and Republican parties, there is a split in attitudes towards women’s representation.  That’s both among elites and also among the general public.  So for example, this is Gallup data on the question:  Do you think this country would be governed better or governed worse if more women were in political office?  So this is the percentage of respondents saying the country would be governed better if there were more women in political office.  On the horizontal axis, the passage of time; on the vertical axis, the percentage of respondents.   

So what you can see – and this is actually – this gap is increasing in recent years – is over 80 percent of Democrats say the country would be governed better if there were more women in office, as compared to actually a decline among Republicans, only 32 percent saying the country would be governed better.  So Democrats, both elites and voters, are more likely to prioritize group representation, the representation of women, people from historically underrepresented groups.  Republican voters and elites are more likely to say that they are concerned with individual merit and put less emphasis on group representatives. 

Okay, so given those patterns, what would be expect as we move forward into 2024?  So what we have seen thus far in 2018, 2020, and 2022 are large increases in women’s candidacies in recent elections.  So this is data from the Center for American Women and Politics presented here via FiveThirtyEight, and what you can see is this – on the horizontal axis we have our election years, on the vertical axis the number of women entering primaries for Congress.  And we’ve seen big jumps particularly in ’18 for Democratic women and in ’20 for Republican women. 

Okay, so then what do we expect for 2024?  So not all states have yet closed their filing deadlines, so we still have time for candidates to file for office.  And we’re not through primaries yet, so it’s a little early to talk about how many women will run.  This is data we already know on Senate candidates for 2024 looking at is there a state where we definitely have a woman running.  So that’s in purple. 

I will say our number of women filing thus far to run is lower than it was in 2022, which was an all-time record.  So we actually might see fewer women running for Senate this year than we saw in ’22. 

Likewise, this is data on the House.  So who has filed and who are our nominees?  So here the states in purple are states where women are running.  The one gray state, South Dakota, we don’t have a woman running at all for a House race there, but otherwise in every state we expect to see a woman contest. 

Our – again, our purple here is our filings, so, like, have women to filed to run in 2024 as compared to 2020.  And I will say we’re also a little behind in our filings as compared to what I would expect, so still more women running than historically but I don’t think we’re going to have another record year like we’ve had in ’18 or 2020 or 2022. 

So then a lot of content on one slide, so I think this is an area that we can come back to in Q&A because of course the obvious question is, like, why aren’t there more women in office in the U.S.  So I teach whole classes on this, like semester-long courses, so here’s a very quick summary.  So as academics we think about this as a combination of supply – women’s willingness to run for office – and demand – so do voters want to support women candidates, do political elites want to support women candidates?   

So it is the case in the U.S. that men express more nascent political ambition than women.  So men are more likely to say that they’ve thought about running for office even if they don’t consider themselves qualified to do so.  Even very well-qualified women are less likely to say that they’ve thought about running for office.  So we have an ambition gap. 

Even among ambitious women, it is the case that women in the U.S. have fewer resources necessary to run for office.  So women have less wealth, they have less time, they have less access to the political networks that can help them get a jumpstart on fundraising.   

So there is an issue of women coming forward.  There is also an issue of demand.  So it is still the case that there is voter bias against women candidates in the U.S., so there are still a small but nontrivial number of Americans who report that men make better political candidates than women, right, and a set of Americans who report holding sexist attitudes on surveys.  As researchers we do see that when women run for office in the U.S. they win at the same rates as men, but we also see that the women who run are different; they tend to come in with higher qualifications and they tend to be more selective about the districts in which they run for office.   

It’s also the case that women receive less encouragement to run.  They receive less encouragement to run from friends and family and nonpolitical sources, but they also receive less encouragement to run from political sources, and it is the case that political elites are less likely to recruit women as candidates.   

So both supply and demand together keep women’s representation low.  And then of course, since this is a global briefing, the reality is that in most countries in the world the way we would fix this is we would have gender quotas where we would require parties to run women candidates, but in the U.S. the combination of primaries as a method for candidate selection plus our political culture makes it unlikely that we’re going to be able to implement a quota policy anytime soon.   

Okay.  So I told you I’d talk about women and men as political elites.  I also of course want to talk about women and men as voters.  So a few things to know.  So it has been the case for quite some time now that women in the U.S. vote at higher rates than men, right?  And that’s actually – on the plot here you can see presidential elections from 1964 to 2020.  On the vertical axis you can see the number of the eligible adult population who reported voting.  My men are in gray, my women are in purple.  This is data from the U.S. Census Bureau.  And there is a significant gender gap in women being much more likely to vote than men. 

Though women vote more than men, men are still more political than women in the U.S.  So this is data from the World Value Survey that asks have you ever contacted a government official.  So we have: I have; I might; I would never, and the percentage of respondents.  My men are in yellow and my women are in green.  As you can see, like men are much more likely to say that they’ve contacted a political official than women.  Women are much more likely than men to say they would never do that.  So on the one hand, women vote more.  On the other hand, men do all sorts of political behaviors at higher rates.  

Okay.  So I anticipate that in 2024 women will continue to vote at a higher rate than men.  So then who will they vote for?  So what we have seen in the U.S. is a very consistent gender gap in vote choice since 1980.  So here on the horizontal access, I have my elections.  This is 72 though 16.  On my horizontal access, I have the margin for the Democrats and the Republicans. So zero is basically no difference; positive values mean a positive margin, doing better among Democrats, Democrats doing better; negative values down here, Republicans doing better.   

And so what you can see is basically in 1980 with Reagan this gender gap opens up, where women are more likely than men to be in favor of the Democratic Party, to vote for the Democratic candidate.  Men are more likely than women to vote for the Republican candidate.  And that gap is actually widening over time.   

So I think that this often gets framed as women are Democrats, but actually the way I think about this is that men vote Republican.  So this is data from the Cooperative Election Study.  This is data from the 2022 House of Representatives election among validated voters, so people that we know voted.  So on the horizontal access, I have my men and I have my women.  On my vertical access, I have the percentage of their votes.  Blue means you voted for the Democrat; orange you voted for the Republican.   

So what you can see is like a small gender gap here on the women – not small, I would say 5 percent, so that’s really meaningful, a five percentage point gap in women’s support for Democrats, so 52 percent of women voted for Democrats in the 2022 House elections compared to 47 percent for the Republican Party. 

But the bigger gap here in among men.  There’s a 12 percentage point gap in men’s support for Republicans as compared to Democrats; 55 percent of men vote for Republicans; 43 percent of men vote for Democrats in 2022.  And that is especially pronounced if we look at white men.  So if we look at white men, 61 percent of them voted Republican; 37 percent of them voted Democrat.  So like really in some ways the gender gap is that the Republican Party does really well among men, Democratic Party struggles. 

I will say though that there is something unique about Trump here, in that Trump does seem to struggle with women voters.  So this is the same men and women support for the Democrat in blue and the Republican in orange, right.  But instead of looking at House elections, I’m looking at 2020 vote share.  And here you see the gap is actually much larger among women.  So in 2020, women were significantly more likely to vote for Biden and that gap is much larger than the gap between men support for Trump and Biden.  

Okay, so based on that, what would I expect from women voters in 2024?  So more generally, I think we can be very sure Trump will win among white men, both college-educated and especially non-college-educated.  He will win among older white women, and he will win among white, non-college-educated women.  We can be quite sure that Biden will win voters of color, especially black women, who are a real core constituency for both Biden and the Democratic Party.  He will win young women; he will win single women; and he will win college-educated women.   

That being said, the things that really matter are margins and mobilization.  So what is the margin by which Biden can win some of these groups?  So for example, what’s the margin by which he can win college-educated white women and what is mobilization, so what does mobilization look like.  So for example, can Biden turn out some of these constituencies, like black women, other women of color, young women, who have been really core to his support.   

And to prepare for this this morning, I wanted to bring you lots of data, so I was digging into the New York Times/Siena poll from just this past week.  And I will say, it made me really worry, because women in particular in the poll for this month and the past few months are much more negative about the economy than men, right.  And so seeing women express that kind of – these negative feelings about the economy, and it’s a big gap, suggests that the Biden campaign might have to really work hard to mobilize some of these key constituencies.   

And so with that, thank you so much.   

MODERATOR:  Thank you so much.  We’ll now go to the question-and-answer session.  If you have a question, please raise your virtual hand.  And when I call on you, please state your name and your media outlet.  And let’s go to Marija.  Go ahead and unmute yourself, please.  

QUESTION:  Marija Milutinovic, Telegraf, Serbia.  So I had one question.  What measures can we – or can we take to encourage greater participation of women political life, as political leaders and as voters.  

MS O’BRIEN:  Yeah.  So in the U.S. – I’ll take the political leaders part first.  So a huge part of the gap in the U.S. in order to elect more women is you need to elect more Republican women, right.  So for example, the Democratic House delegation is at 40 percent women.  Of course, there’s room to get to 50 percent.  There’s certainly room to elect more women senators.  But the big gap is among Republican women, so Republican political elites need to go and recruit more Republican women to run. 

And a huge issue I think – if I can show you – in particular like for the Republican Party – so in the U.S., as you know, money is really, really important to politics.  So we have these political action committees that donate money to campaigns.  So in – on the Democratic side, there’s an incredibly successful political action committee, Emily’s List, that does like a very good job of raising a lot of money and spending a lot of money to elect women candidates who are supportive of women’s rights.  On the Republican side, there’s nothing like it.  There’s just so much less support.   

And so I think they’re just probably – if you want to increase women’s numbers overall, you need the Republican Party to take seriously the need to elect more women, to start recruiting women, and to start making sure there’s women, get the money they need to get over the – like get – to win primaries and then to be able to win in their general election.   

And I think what it – like women already vote at really high rates compared to men, but, like, to get more women to vote or to get women to engage in other types of political behavior, a lot of that is about lowering the barriers.  Like women in the U.S. still, like all over the world, are way more responsible for second shift work, right.  They do more housework.  They have less free time.  They have less money.  They just – getting women – making those bigger structural changes so women have more of the resources they need I think would go a long way to boosting women’s engagement.   

MODERATOR:  Great.   

QUESTION:  Thank you so much.  

MODERATOR:  And just a reminder, if you have a question, please raise your virtual hand or you can also post your question in the chat.  While we wait, I will take a pre-submitted question.  From Ilja Willems from Netherlands, her question is: “After Hillary Clinton’s defeat and the Women’s March in 2017, a lot of efforts was put into stimulating more women to become a part of local politics.  We were hoping to see a wave of female politicians, but I wondered if those efforts have led to any significant changes in the number of women?”   

MS O’BRIEN:  Yeah, I – we have seen a significant increase in women’s candidacies starting in ’18, so that has been really efficacious, right.  And that’s not just at the national level; that’s also at the local level too.  So we’ve seen more political interest than ever before from women.  We also – actually, I will say though it gets covered less – saw a surge in men’s candidacies as well, so we just had more people running for office in the Trump era.   

I think it’s a real question mark of whether we can keep that enthusiasm going post ’22, right.  So I think in particular if we have another Biden win, if the energy still feels there.  There is a huge surge of energy now, I will also say, in states where abortion is not legal.  So we’re seeing a lot of women’s organizing both to run for office but social movement, organizing around shifting abortion policy, and so continuing to mobilize women around issues that are salient to them is another good strategy.   

MODERATOR:  Great.  Thank you.  And we had – we’ll take a question from Mira Wecker.  Go ahead and unmute yourself.   

QUESTION:  Hello.  Thank you very much for your presentation.  I wondered – you showed the graph that men are more likely to vote Republican or vote more Republican.  So would that also mean that the Democrat need to encourage men more to vote for them?  And how could that look like?   

MS O’BRIEN:  So this is, I think, a huge debate within contemporary Democratic Party politics is the extent to which you should try to focus your efforts on winning over male voters who have left the party, right, versus mobilizing a new base of non-white voters, right, women voters, and trying to shore up that support.  I think the answer is to try to do both and to, I think, focus on policy issues that are broadly popular.   

Like both men and women will say that their most important issue in the run up to this election is the economy, right, so focusing on messaging around fighting inflation, right, and a fairer America is probably like the best – one of the best strategies to try to target both groups.  I don’t think has to be an either/or.  Like I don’t think that in order to win back men, you have to give up on women, and so I think this is doable.  I have other thoughts that I would be happy to get into on the extent to which like the economy versus other issues drove Trump vote share in 2016, if that is of interest, but I’ll leave it there now.   

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  I’ll take another submitted questions.  This is from Mohamed Maher from Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt.  He says – he asks: “Do you agree barriers that women face running for high-profile office, do they get worse the higher the office?”   

MS O’BRIEN:  Yes, it is harder for women to compete for a higher level and more prestigious positions.  So we have stereotypes in the U.S. about the types of positions that women are a good fit for and the policy areas that women are a good fit for.  A continued challenge for women, for example, if we think about the presidential office, is voters in the U.S. believe that women are better at some issues – like handling education, healthcare, childcare, issues related to women – but they believe that men are more competent at handling issues like national security and defense.  And so when we think about the presidency and other very high-level positions, that creates a challenge for women. 

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  I see another hand raised from Fana, Ethiopia.  Go ahead and unmute yourself. 

QUESTION:  Okay, thank you.  My name is Tibebesilasse; I’m from Africa, Ethiopia – from East Africa.  My questions – you said in U.S. politics the womens are represented in – less in office.  For this, the main reason is political elites are – lastly recruits or selects women.  What is the reason?  Is it because of ability?  Is it because of encouragement?  Or what is the main reason?  Thank you very much. 

MS O’BRIEN:  I think part of this is simply networks.  So there’s a scholar at Davidson College called Melody Crowder-Meyer.  So she did some surveys of Democratic and Republican party elites at local level, and she just asked them, like, who do you think of if you had to think of a candidate – no gendering of that.  So what she finds is that women party elites are much more likely to name a women than are men party elites, because women happen to have more women in their networks.  The challenge is that there are many more men party elites, and especially on the Republican side, there are just many more men already engaged in politics.  So part of it is, like, if people who are currently in power are looking at their networks, they’re not seeing that many women.   

I will say also there is just a difference, and Democratic voters and elites are just more likely to say, like, yeah, it’s important to have women present; and Republican party elites are more likely to say we care about the individual, we care about merit, we don’t think you should be talking about men versus women or black versus white.  And so they have been less – it has been less consistent with their ideology to think about, okay, how would we boost the number of women, right.  They’re much more like, how can we find the best candidate, and then if you’re looking for the best candidate within your existing networks, you’re just more likely to see the people who are already there, who are disproportionately men.   

So I think to shift it, the Republican party is going to have to embrace – like, we have to go out and look for some more women.  Elise Stefanik from New York had been – had, like, a PAC and was trying to do this, but – and has had some success.  But there needs to be a more concerted effort. 

MODERATOR:  All right, thank you.  I will give one final call for questions.  I don’t see any other hands raised, so Professor O’Brien, I will turn it over to you, back to you, for final remarks. 

MS O’BRIEN:  I think there’s one question here in the chat – find out if there are any laws in the Constitution which limit women getting into politics; like, maybe the requirements to get some specific offices.  So in the U.S., not – requirements are quite low, right.  So residency requirements to live in your district, citizenship requirements, and some age requirements, but, like, otherwise not these kind of formal barriers.  At the same time, also no policies that encourage the selection of women candidates, as we have in many countries in the world.  So the formal barriers have been removed, right, so it’s mostly structural barriers or informal barriers. 

And then I suppose the last thing I’ll say is, again, I’m happy to chat broadly about women’s representation.  I’m happy to email you my slides if that’s useful.  I’m just – I feel – I think we all feel really fortunate that so many brilliant people from all over the world are interested in engaging in U.S. politics, particularly in thinking about the position of women in U.S. politics.  So thank you so much. 

MODERATOR:  Thank you so much.  That would be very helpful, and I will share the slides with the journalists who participated today. 

MS O’BRIEN:  Great. 

MODERATOR:  So I would like to thank Professor O’Brien for taking the time to brief us today, and I would like to thank the journalists for participating.  And with that, this concludes today’s briefing.