Research shows electing women makes a real difference in people’s lives

Democratic socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated veteran Democrat Joe Crowley in a stunning upset in New York’s primary elections Tuesday night that revealed a deep rift in liberal politics.

Ocasio-Cortez’s win is also a big deal for women and for American culture. If she wins in the general election in November and heads to Congress, she could become a part of an important phenomenon researchers have discovered again and again.

Research shows women govern differently than men in ways that change policy and even social attitudes. When more women get into politics, a lot more changes than you might think.

Academics have found this over and over again: Women legislators are more likely to introduce legislation that specifically benefits women. They’re better at bringing funding back to their home districts. They get more done. A woman legislator, on average, passed twice as many bills as a male legislator in one recent session of Congress.

But the research that stands out most shows that having more women in elected office fundamentally changes the way that society perceives women — and the way that young women think about themselves.

When more women run for and win elected office, adolescent girls are more likely to indicate an interest in running for office. And according to one major, peer-reviewed study conducted in India, more women in government office leads to parents perceiving their daughters differently, assigning them less housework, and investing more in their educations.

The United States has spent decades falling behind on women’s representation in elected office. In 1997, we used to rank 41st in the world for the percentage of nationally elected seats held by women. These days, we’ve fallen all the way down to 103th, with 19.4 percent of congressional seats occupied by women legislators.

A record number of female candidates running for office and scoring electoral victories in 2018’s midterm primaries. It’s quite possible that, come early 2019, we’ll have more women serving as governors, senators, and House members than ever before.

The 2018 midterms have a chance to begin reversing those trends — and that could make a huge difference for young women growing up in the United States today.

Congress has become increasingly female over the past three decades. In 1991 there were 33 women legislators. Today there are 104.

That’s still far from gender parity; men outnumber women four to one in Congress. But all signs so far from the 2018 midterms suggest the number of women will rise come November.

“According to Bloomberg, 41 of the 92 women, or nearly half, running for the House or Senate are expected to advance in their races,” Vox’s Li Zhou wrote of the primaries earlier this week. “Women also dominated a slew of statewide contests, including governors’ races in South Dakota and Alabama. And while a majority of Tuesday’s wins were on the Democratic side, much like those in previous primaries this year, Republican women in California and New Mexico saw some victories as well.”

And already, the increased presence of women legislators in Congress has changed the way the legislative body works.

Michele Swers, a political scientist at Georgetown University, has written multiple books examining how this shifting gender balance has changed the body. Her research consistently finds that women in Congress tend to shift the conversation to focus more on bills and policies that relate to women specifically — such as increasing paid leave or prosecuting violence against women.

One of her papers looked at Congress in the mid-1990s, comparing women and men legislators of similar ideologies. She found that liberal women legislators co-sponsored an average of 10.6 bills related to women’s health — an average of 5.3 more than their liberal male colleagues.

Changing the conversation can have an effect on the laws that Congress eventually passes: One recent study of Congress since 2009 found that the average woman legislator had 2.31 of her bills enacted, compared with men, who turned 1.57 bills into law.

“Women in Congress are just more likely to prioritize issues that have a direct connection to women — violence against women, family leave policy, those kind of things,” Swers told me. “The more you can directly connect the consequence to women, the more you see female legislators getting involved.”

One reason we might care about increasing women’s representation in government is if we think they will govern differently — if we think different laws will get passed or certain topics will get discussed at greater length.

And the studies discussed above certainly do show that to be the case.

But more importantly, having more women in government changes how society thinks about all women — and how young women think about themselves.

Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at Notre Dame University, has found that adolescent girls are more likely to indicate an interest in running for office during years when there is lots of media coverage of women in politics.

Another one of her studies looked at 23 developed countries with varied levels of women in government. It found that in the countries with more women legislators, young women were more likely to participate in politics and have political discussions, and that young women expressed a greater interest in becoming politically active in the future.

Or consider an influential 2012 study in the journal Science, which looked at what happened when India randomly assigned some political positions to women. In villages assigned to have women “pradhans,” essentially city council chiefs, parents became more aspirational in what they expected of their daughters.

The fraction of parents who believed that a daughter’s occupation (but not a son’s) should be determined by her in-laws declined from 76 percent to 65 percent. Adolescent girls in those areas also became less likely to want to be housewives — and the gap in educational attainment between young boys and young girls completely closed.

Of course, there are significant differences between India and the United States. But the idea that representation changes how we perceive a younger generation — what types of things they’ll be able to achieve in their lifetimes, what sort of careers they ought to pursue — is pretty universal.

All of this research shows that it can matter hugely when we see someone like ourselves in a position of power. It shows: You can do this too.