Do We Really Need a Femininemenon?: The Gendered Context of Congress and Women’s Representation

Authors

Hannah Scholen, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

First Advisor

Dr. Geoff Lorenz

Second Advisor

Dr. Alice Kang

Document Type

Thesis

Citation

Scholen, Hannah. Do We Really Need a Femininemenon?: The Gendered Context of Congress and Women's Representation. Undergraduate Honors Thesis. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. March 2025.

Comments

Copyright Hannah Scholen 2025.

Abstract

Does the changing gendered context of Congress affect women’s representation? The literature shows that women are more likely than men to prioritize and introduce issues that have a distinct impact on women, such as education and health, and that women’s power as a minority group changes when their numbers grow. With the growing number of women in Congress, it’s crucial to understand how that increase affects Congresswomen. I use the Center for Effective Lawmaking’s Legislative Effective Score methodology, focusing on the education and health Issue Area LES’, and run interaction regressions to study the relationship between gender and legislative effectiveness, moderated by the percentage of women in the chamber. I find that having more women in Congress makes Congresswomen more effective at legislating on education and health issues, but there are some differences based on party affiliation. My findings both confirm the importance of continuing to grow the number of women in Congress and show a need for a shift in the field of study of gender and politics: the need to study gender not as a static variable but as a contextually fluid one.