As a scholar who studies women and Congress, when I was invited to write for this issue, I was struck by the fact that the proportion of women in the Legislative Studies Section (LSS), 22%, closely mirrors the proportion of women in Congress. According to the Center for American Women and Politics (2019), women constitute 23.6% of the 116th Congress (2019–2020). Thus, women’s standing in the section is comparable to other high-status fields, from Congress to law-firm partnerships that require advanced credentials and long hours and reflect a set of institutional norms that were developed largely by men over a long period of time. Like other institutions, the advancement of more women into the field will require openness to change and investment in mentoring and recruitment.
Studying descriptive representation, I occupy multiple fields working with both legislative scholars and women and politics scholars. As a result, I inhabit spaces that are predominantly male and spaces that are largely female. Going to graduate school at Harvard in the late 1990s, I was the only woman studying American politics in my entering cohort. There were a few women in the cohorts ahead of me and they were early mentors. When I started my job at Georgetown in 2002, I was again the only woman in the American politics field; that remained true until relatively recently. However, in the Washington, DC, area, several women study legislative politics, including Sarah Binder, Frances Lee, Jennifer Victor, Colleen Shogan, Molly Reynolds, Stella Rouse, Kris Miller, Anne Marie Cammisa, Marian Currinder, and many others. Thus, although I have generally been a minority in rooms of legislative scholars, I have never felt alone.
When I first started going to political science conferences, there were few women on the panels and roundtables. I particularly admired Barbara Sinclair. Her books on the Senate and the evolution of the parties in Congress strongly influenced my thinking about institutional norms, partisan polarization, and how gender might interact with partisanship and other incentives that shape legislative behavior. If she was listed as a presenter, I always tried to attend that panel. She was the rock star I most admired, and when she spoke to me once in an elevator, I felt like I had met Barbra Streisand.
Although many more women attend conferences and present on panels today, we remain a minority in the field. When I present on a legislative panel or attend a specialized conference or workshop, there usually are more men than women in the room. By contrast, when I present on a panel sponsored or cosponsored by the Women and Politics Section or attend a specialized conference on descriptive representation or women candidates, the audience is almost exclusively women. Both fields could benefit from more gender balance.
To welcome more women into legislative studies, I think the field must focus more intentionally on recruitment and mentoring. With regard to recruitment, I encourage those who are organizing specialized conferences and the section chairs who select the papers for panels to include more women as panelists, discussants, and chairs. Our networks tend to be small, developed in graduate school and from years of attending the same conferences and panels. By reaching out to who we know, we perpetuate that insular cycle. When I recently chaired several job-search committees for my department, I realized that to recruit a more diverse pool of applicants, I needed to reach outside of my usual networks and contact people I did not know to attract a broader set of candidates. When organizing a conference or panel, we need to move beyond what is comfortable and recruit a mix of younger and older scholars, men and women, racial and ethnic minorities. A conference with more diverse perspectives will broaden our networks and make for a more interesting dialogue.
Another area that we should focus on is mentoring. No one achieves success in political science without guidance from mentors along the way. I have benefited from the advice of male and female mentors throughout my career. These mentors have connected me to other scholars and interview subjects for my research. They have read my work, shared data, and offered helpful comments and advice. They have invited me to conferences that sparked ideas and have asked me to contribute to edited volumes that brought my work to new audiences. As a young scholar, the scariest and most important thing one can do is ask. Invite a scholar you want to connect with for coffee or to a brief meeting at APSA to discuss their work and how it influences yours. Attend an LSS business meeting and/or reception and strike up a conversation with someone whose work interests you. Approach the author of a conference paper after the panel ends. Make yourself known and send a thank-you email to build the relationship. Established scholars need to be open to expanding their networks and building new relationships to foster young talent.
Invite a scholar you want to connect with for coffee or to a brief meeting at APSA to discuss their work and how it influences yours.
Finally, if we want to broaden the audience for our work, we must expand the range of articles considered for publication in our journals. When submitting work or being asked to review, I am always struck by the question, “Will this work be of interest or suitable for readers of X journal?” One thing that likely prevents more women from publishing in journals is the tendency to silo ourselves into specific outlets. Studies that focus on gender and legislatures should not be routinely funneled to specialized gender outlets, just as work on state legislatures should not be assumed to be of interest only to readers of State Politics and Policy Quarterly. Legislative scholars will benefit from reading more work on a variety of topics that utilizes a mix of methodologies.
By implementing these recommendations, the legislative field can increase the membership of women beyond the proportions in Congress and aspire to be more like Colorado and Oregon, which have more than 40% women in their state legislatures, or even the Nevada Assembly (i.e., the lower house), which now has an equal number of men and women, demonstrating that gender parity is within reach (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2018).
