A few days before the election, Rachel blogged that “women were poised to make gains in election” and asked, “If the number of women increases, do you think this could affect policies or do you think we will start to see the women politicians join the ranks of the ‘good old boys’?”
There are two reports from the Institute For Women’s Policy Research that suggest that more female legislators does mean more feminist and pro-woman laws will be passed. The first, “Does Women’s Representation in Elected Office Lead to Women-Friendly Policy?” (pdf link) looks at how many laws benefiting women, such as “protection from violence, access to income support (through welfare and child support collection), women-friendly employment protections, legislation protecting sexual minorities, and reproductive rights,” have been passed in each of the fifty states. ((The three best states for women, by this measure: Hawaii, Vermont and Washington. The three worst: Tennessee, Mississippi, and Idaho.))
What the IWPR found is that the more women are in elected office in a state, and the more powerful those elected offices are, the more woman-friendly legislation gets passed.
As the authors point out, the direction of causation is ambiguous. Maybe more women in office leads to more “woman-friendly” laws; but it’s also possible that states that are open to these laws are more likely to elect women legislators. I think it’s likely that both are true.
On an aggregate level, women’s presence in legislatures and other state-level elected offices is closely associated with better policy for women. This suggests that having women in elected office may be important to encouraging states to adopt policies relevant to women’s lives. Conversely, women’s resources and rights may influence the number of women elected to public office.
The second IWPR report, “Gender Differences in Bill Sponsorship on Women’s Issues” (pdf link), examines who sponsors which bills. From the report:
Within each party, women are more likely to sponsor women’s issue bills than are their male colleagues.
Across both Congresses, between 23 percent and 27 percent points more Democratic women than Democratic men utilized their scarce resources of time, staff, and political capital to develop women’s issue legislation. Among Republicans, 83 percent of Republican women sponsored a women’s issue bill in the 103rd Congress, compared to just 37 percent of Republican men. However, in the 104th Congress, the proportion of Republican women sponsoring women’s issue bills dropped to 59 percent, only 12 percentage points more than Republican men. This 24 percentage point drop was largely due to the election of six conservative Republican freshman women, none of whom sponsored any type of women’s issue bill. […]
The influence of gender on a member’s legislative behavior is highly dependent on his/her specific political ideology. All Democratic women and moderate Republican women are much more likely to sponsor women’s issue bills than are their male colleagues of the same party and ideology. In contrast, conservative Republican women are not more likely to sponsor women’s issue bills than are their conservative Republican male counterparts.
So it appears likely that having women in government does make a difference to what laws are proposed and passed.
Although these reports are several years old, they’re especially relevant today, since we have now elected record-breaking numbers of women to congress, and we will soon have the first female Speaker of the House in US history. (I really love Jen’s take on that).
[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]
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Not to dispute the general point, but I would like to see more recent data. Being a social scientist, I understand the significant lag time on data, and in many cases I don’t think it is a big problem. My concerns in this case are 1) the numbers are changing very fast and 2) there may be a “tipping point.” By this I mean a point at which there is a critical mass of women who may be able to make a difference. Of course, the other “chicken or the egg” (causation) problem which you mention above is also important.
What I would also be curious about is whether or not their is a correlations between the number of women legislators and the general well being of women. In particular, I’m curious if the number of female legislators is associated with gender equality operationalized as 1)a decrease in the pay gap 2)a decrease in poverty 3) an increase in education and other general measures of social inequality.
Why is this classified under “Women-Friendly Policies”? Sexual minorities include women as well as men in roughly equal numbers (AFAIK).
Hey Amp,
My question is why does it seem that nobody on this site except for you and I gives a damn about this subject. When I posted, I got about two responses.
I find that a little disturbing. I thought this would be a hot topic.
I didn’t post a reply because nobody would like my answers. In fact, when I commented on a related thread further down, my answer was definitely not welcome.
It’s tough to be 3rd party advocate amongst feminists, and vice versa. I’m losing the urge to discuss either issue with anyone. Frankly, I’d rather retreat quietly to my homepage and collage instead of dealing with dual-source agita all the time.
More than once in my fabulous blogging career, I have cited a piece at the Center For Voting and Democracy that attributed the larger proportion of women in several other countries to the existence of proportional representation. Every time I posted it, I was treated to utter silence or some snide remark about my own party affiliation (or lack of one, these days). Eventually, I just gave up.
I’ve read that women and minorities do better in proportional democracy because voters vote for an entire slate of candidates, rather than individual candidates. Since voters like seeing diversity, slates that have a mix of races and genders tend to do better in elections than slates that are mainly uni-sex and uni-racial.
Unfortunately, I don’t know where it was I read that; it was something I read in a class in college. Do you have the URL for the article, Ms Xeno?
No clue. I never understand why some topics get lots of comments and some hardly any.
The numbers aren’t changing fast enough for me! :p
So women will be 16% of the House and 16% of the Senate. I agree that it’s possible that there’s a “tipping point” effect, but I intuitively expect it to be significantly higher than 16%. More like 35-45%, if I had to guess.
As long as I’m quoting statistics from that article, let me stick this depressing area of no gain in:
Since as far as I know no one every passes legislation protecting female but not male sexual minorities, it’s a distinction without a difference. If you consider protecting lesbians to be an example of a woman-friendly policy, then the places which have such a policy are the places which have passed legislation providing protections to sexual minorities.
That’s not what I was implying.
I’m saying that specifically classifying some policy as Women-Friendly, does IMO refer to policies that are made for the benefit of women (thus the gendering on this term either excludes men: Like some forms of BC, or benefit more women than men [pretty much all the rest]) except this one.
In some ways, putting this under the umbrella women-friendly makes about as much sense as putting (say) and anti-racial discrimination bill under that said umbrella. Obviously, people can be non-white and women (!), but in effect this makes the “Women-Friendly” qualifier nonsensical.
Am I making myself clear?
Yes, the race numbers are pathetic.
Ms-xeno, There is a part of me that believes that many women like to avoid politics as a general subject. (Lately there have been a bunch of guys on the board, so I don’t know why they don’t chime in.) I have experienced this before at parties or in my classes. We will start talking politics and suddenly most of the women tune out. I don’t like to stereotype, and I don’t know what the data says about gender and political interest, but this often lingers in my mind in these discussions.
“Why is this classified under “Women-Friendly Policies”? Sexual minorities include women as well as men in roughly equal numbers (AFAIK).”
The topics are related. The same structural features that discriminate against women work against minorities. The point is that proportional voting systems promote diversity and balanced representation, while winner-take-all systems homogenize and exclude.
Amp, you could start here. The Center’s own page is also worth reading.
Rachel, there may not be that many women here lately talking politics, but that’s hardly a sign that they aren’t talking. There are dozens of boards out there dominated by women talking politics. Here, I do think that a lot of us are simply weary at butting heads with the same old posters, who are often men, over and over again on the same issues. We also lost some articulate women in the wake of Amp’s announcement about the domain sale.
My own POV can be summed up pretty succinctly, now that I’ve been repeating it over and over in various forums over the years: The average Lefty I run into online is White, male, and willfully ignorant (sometimes hostile) about feminism. The average feminist I run into online is White, Democratic, and willfully ignorant (sometimes hostile) about issues of 3rd Party politics and electoral reform. I said in my own space that I fully expect to be dead and rotting in the ground before this ever changes, and certainly nothing that’s happened IRL in the last week has changed my mind on this one iota.
Lately there have been a bunch of guys on the board, so I don’t know why they don’t chime in.
I didn’t think that writing, “I don’t know,” was really going to contribute anything.
LOL!! Probably not.
You have to learn to write “I don’t know” in a witty fashion.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 was a generally reactionary piece of legislation, however it “reduced the age at which homosexual acts are lawful from 21 to 18, and altered the definition of rape to include anal rape of men. Those provisions could be classed as “man friendly”. Women already had legal protection from rape, and there was no age of consent for lesbian sex at all, none of which changed, so I cannot see how this could possibly be construed as “women friendly”.
So? That doesn’t make legislation which benefits minorities “women friendly”. It makes them “minority friendly”.
Rachel:
A request. Please expand upon critical mass, when related to gender/feminist political actions and reactions.
Thanks
Steve
Within each party, women are more likely to sponsor women’s issue bills than are their male colleagues.
I’m not actually sure this shows that women legislators are more interested in women’s issues bills than men. I suspect they probably are, but I am not sure this data proves it. A lot of the reason for this may be that women are more likely to be chosen to sponsor women’s issues bills for political reasons than men. I would think votes would be a better way to judge this.
I think an ideal House of Representatives would have 500 members chosen from the American people by lot. This would be a large enough sample to provide a statistically accurate representation of the general public. You would have instant correct proportional representation of women and minorities of every stripe.
Barring that pie-in-the-sky fantasy, though, ms xeno is right. Elected proportional representation would be far superior to what we have now. What is really sad is that, in theory, we could partially do it now without changing the Constitution. Representatives have be chosen on a state-by-state basis, but within each state, the state legisature can decide the method of election. So a large state like mine COULD chose elect Reps to the House by proportional representation. But of course no member of a major party would propose that in the state legislature. It would have to be done by ballot initative, if it could be accomplished at all.
Steve,
I guess by critical mass/tipping point I am referring to the point at which there are enough women that we have a strong influence on policy. When we have very small numbers, we don’t have much influence, but I think there is a point in which we will have high enough numbers that our issues are more prominent.
Our experience of proportional representation has definately greatly increased the representation of women and non-white people (also the world’s first transgender MP).
However, I’m really not sure it’s made a difference in terms of policy. Proportional representation came in and 1996, and I’m pretty sure that the only legislation that is advantageous to women is Prostitution law reform (and obviously there are different views about that). There have been far more attacks on women, such as cuts in the domestic purposes benefit.
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