How Many Women in House of Representatives 2019
Women brand upward simply over a quarter of all members of the 117th Congress – the highest pct in U.Southward. history and a considerable increase from where things stood even a decade ago.
Counting both the House of Representatives and the Senate, 144 of 539 seats – or 27% – are held by women. That represents a 50% increment from the 96 women who were serving in the 112th Congress a decade ago, though it remains far beneath the female share of the overall U.S. population. A tape 120 women are serving in the newly elected House, accounting for 27% of the total. In the Senate, women agree 24 of 100 seats, one fewer than the record number of seats they held in the last Congress.
This assay counts voting too equally nonvoting members of Congress. Figures for the 117th Congress exclude two House seats that were vacant every bit of early on Jan. Information technology as well excludes Sens. Kamala Harris, who is expected to resign her seat alee of her inauguration as vice president on January. xx, and Kelly Loeffler, who lost a runoff ballot in Georgia earlier this month. Both are set to be replaced past men.
This analysis builds on before Pew Research Eye piece of work to clarify the gender makeup of Congress.
In the House, one New York race has not been called yet, and i Louisiana seat is empty because the congressman-elect died earlier he could be sworn in. Both seats were vacant when Congress was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2021, and then the current number of representatives is 439. This analysis includes nonvoting members.
Independent members of Congress are counted with the party they conclave with.
Because Sen. Kamala Harris will ascend to the vice presidency this month, we are not including her in the count of female senators. We are, withal, counting her seat equally Democrat-held because a Democrat has been named to take her place.
For historical information on Congress, nosotros used data from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives Function of the Historian, the Congressional Research Service's "Women in the United States Congress, 1917-2014" and CQ Whorl Call. For 2020-21 election results, we used data from Ballotpedia and the Associated Press, besides as news reports.
Women make up a much bigger share of congressional Democrats (38%) than Republicans (14%). Across both chambers, at that place are 106 Democratic women and 38 Republican women in the new Congress. Women account for 40% of House Democrats and 32% of Senate Democrats, compared with 14% of House Republicans and xvi% of Senate Republicans.
The 2022 full general election sent but one new congresswoman to the Senate, Republican Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, making her the first female senator to represent that land.
Republican women made significant gains in the Business firm in the most contempo election cycle. Of the 27 newly elected representatives who are women, two-thirds (18) are Republicans. Betwixt the 115th and 116th Congresses, the number of GOP women in the House fell from 25 to 15. That number doubled this year to 30, the highest total ever.
California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and the commencement female person speaker of the Firm, is serving her quaternary term as speaker later being reelected before this month.
The partisan gender division hasn't always looked this way. Until the 1929 stock market crash, most of the dozen women elected to the Business firm were Republicans, and for several decades later the two parties were generally shut in numbers in that chamber. But the gap widened in the 1970s and has persisted, despite a temporary narrowing during the Reagan-Bush 1980s. Of the 232 women elected to the House in 1992 or later, 157 (68%) accept been Democrats, as have 27 of the 42 women (64%) who accept served in the Senate since 1992.
The history of women in Congress
Women have been in Congress for more a century. The first, Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana, was elected to the Business firm in 1916, two years after her land gave women the vote. But information technology'south just been in the past few decades that women accept served in more substantial numbers. About 2-thirds of the women ever elected to the House (232 of 352, including the newest members of the 117th Congress) accept been elected in 1992 or later.
The pattern is similar in the Senate: 42 of the 58 women who accept always served in the Senate – including Lummis, the newest female person senator – took function in 1992 or after.
The 19th Amendment, which extended the franchise to women across the nation, was ratified in 1920. That Nov, Alice Mary Robertson of Oklahoma became the first woman to defeat an incumbent congressman. (She lost the seat back to him ii years later.) In 1922, veteran suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia was appointed to fill a vacant Senate seat; when Congress was unexpectedly called back into session, Felton was sworn in as the start-ever female person senator, though she but served for a day.
While women remained scarce in the Senate well into the 1980s, their numbers gradually, though non consistently, increased in the House – mostly paralleling the expansion of women's roles in guild more broadly. In 1928, seven women were elected to the 71st Congress, a record at the time, and two more than joined them later via special ballot. But that trend plateaued during the Great Depression and World State of war II. Information technology wasn't until afterwards the war that the up trajectory of women in Congress resumed, with eighteen women serving in the House in 1961-62.
Although the 1970s saw prominent figures such as Barbara Jordan, Elizabeth Holtzman and Bella Abzug enter Congress, women'southward overall numbers didn't alter much until 1981, when their House caucus exceeded 20 members for the first time. The big jump, however, came in 1992 – later on dubbed "The Yr of the Adult female" – when four new female senators and 24 new congresswomen were elected. Academics take offered various explanations for why 1992 was such a breakthrough twelvemonth for women in Congress, including an unusually large number of open seats due to redistricting and backfire from the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings.
'Widow's succession' in Congress
Well into the 1970s, one of the most common ways for a woman to enter Congress was past succeeding her deceased husband or begetter, either by election or appointment. Of the 90 women who served in the House betwixt 1916 and 1980, 31 were initially elected to their husband's seat later on he died; iii were chosen to replace their husbands on the ballot when the men died before Election Day; and one, Winnifred Mason Huck of Illinois, was elected in 1922 to fill up the terminal iv months of her tardily father'southward term. (Another early congresswoman, Katherine Gudger Langley of Kentucky, won her husband's seat in 1926 later he resigned following his conviction for violating Prohibition laws.)
Like Langley, most of the holders of these so-called "widow'southward succession" seats stayed in Congress for but a term or two. But some went on to distinguished careers on Capitol Hill. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, for instance, won a special ballot in 1940 to fill the concluding seven months of her husband's term. Smith went on to win four full House terms on her own, then was elected to four terms in the Senate, thereby becoming the starting time woman to serve in both chambers. Lindy Boggs, who was elected to her husband'south seat in 1973 subsequently he was presumed killed in a airplane crash, served nearly 18 years. She afterwards was named U.S. administrator to the holy see.
Six of the xiv women who served in the Senate before 1980 were either elected or appointed to fill their late husbands' seats. Of those, only two (Hattie Caraway of Arkansas and Maurine Brown Neuberger of Oregon) subsequently won full terms in their own correct.
Note: This is an update of a post originally published Dec. 18, 2018.
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/15/a-record-number-of-women-are-serving-in-the-117th-congress/
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