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The Feminization of Leadership in State Legislatures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Malcolm Jewell  and
Marcia Lynn Whicker
Malcolm Jewell
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
Marcia Lynn Whicker
Affiliation:
Rutgers University-Newark
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Extract

Throughout the past two decades, the number of women in elected politics has been increasing slowly, but incrementally. Women remain most underrepresented at the national level, with little prospects of parity in the near future (Whicker et al. 1993). By 1992, women held only 30 or 5.6% of the 535 seats in the 102nd Congress, 28 in the House and two in the Senate (CAWP 1992). Much media focus on increased activism and advances caused the 1992 elections to be labeled in the press as “The Year of the Woman.” Indeed, the number of female members of Congress did jump to 54 or 10.1%, not quite doubling (47 in the House and seven in the Senate) (Krauss 1992), but substantial percentage gains in the number of seats held by women obscured the fact that women remained underrepresented relative to their proportions in the population by over 40%.

At the state level, the number of women is larger, but still proportionately less than their share of approximately 50% of the population. In 1991, women were still only 18.3% of all state legislators, but nationwide, their numbers had increased from 344 in 1971 to 908 in 1981, to 1365 in 1991. The numbers of women in state legislatures, then, have been increasing incrementally, if slowly (Dodson and Carroll 1991). Incremental growth in women attaining state legislative office continued in the 1992 elections. For the 1993 session, the total number of women members was 1517 (20.4%), of which 338 were state senators (17%), and 1179 were state representatives (21.7%) (CAWP).

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 705 - 712
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1993

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