What differences do women make in Congress? (with Michele Swers)
What differences do women make in Congress? (with Michele Swers)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Mon Jan 03 2022
Description: The topic of this episode is, “What differences do women make in Congress?”My guest is Michele Swers, professor of American government at Georgetown University. She studies Congress, congressional elections, and women in politics. She has written a lot of research articles and book chapters, and also is the author of two books on women in Congress. The first one is titled The Difference Women Make: The Policy Impact of Women in Congress. The second book is titled Women in the Club: Gender and Policy Making in the Senate. And, I would be remiss if I did not mention, she is the coauthor of Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence.Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.It is to Professor Swers we now turn to learn about women in Congress. Professor Swers, welcome to the program.Michele Swers: Thank you, Kevin. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of your podcast.Kevin Kosar: Oh, thanks for saying. Let's start with a really simple question. How many women are in Congress today?Michele Swers: So, right now you have 120 women in the House. Eighty-nine are Democrats, 31 are Republicans. And in the Senate, you have 24 women, 16 Democrats, 8 Republicans. From those numbers, you can tell that there are more women who are Democrat than Republicans. And that's because the number of women really started to increase in 1992, and people called that the Year of the Woman, but it was really the Year of the Democratic Women. It was Democrats who elected more women at that time. They had a pretty good year that year. Even in years where Republicans had good years, like 1994, they elected more women, but not a lot more women.In 2018, Democrats elected another Year of the Woman, but they elected more women of color. So there was a lot of attention to that. And that's when I'm sure your listeners know that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes into the picture and Ayanna Pressley and some others. And then in 2020, Republicans did have a very good year. They went from 13 women to 31 in the House of Representatives, and they elected a greater mix of women and minorities. It was a good year from their perspective.But you can tell though that by these numbers, when Democrats are in charge, women have more access to the majority and seats of power. So women are about 40 percent of the Democratic caucus in the House, and that means they have some seniority level. In the House, on the Democratic side, anyway, committee assignments work based on seniority, so you have more women who have access to be chairs. So Rosa DeLauro, head of Appropriations, or Carolyn Maloney as the Oversight chair, Maxine Waters at Financial Services — important committees.On the other hand, for Republicans, women are only about 15 percent of their caucus. They've had a woman in the conference chair position for a very long time — obviously turnover with different women. Most recently, Liz Cheney was pushed out, and Elise Stefanik is now the conference chair. But they don't have as many women with seniority. There are not as many women who will reach those committee chairmanships when Republicans are in charge.Right now you do have Kay Granger at Appropriations. She's the ranking member, so maybe she'll become the chair if Republicans take over in 2022. And Virginia Foxx at Education and Labor, she would need a waiver, so she would like a waiver. And if she doesn't get it, I think Elise Stefanik wants the position. But you don't have that many Republican women with seniority. There's also Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and she could end up becoming chair of Energy and Commerce if things go in the majority. A lot of the women that came in were elected in 2020, and so they're not very senior. It'll be a few years before they could develop into those leadership positions if they stay in Congress.Kevin Kosar: If I can just do a quick follow up on this question — you were highlighting some partisan differences. One thing I observed after the last election was, you had Kevin McCarthy, the head of the House Republicans, on Twitter, bragging about how the GOP had brought women into the party. You’ve studied this stuff for so long. Is this new, the GOP and the House bragging about getting more women, Republican women, into the chamber?Michele Swers: Yes and no. Republicans don't like to play what they call identity politics. They don't want to have policy that is necessarily focused on particular groups. But they do value having diversity in the ranks, because they know that Democrats particularly are going to hit them on this. Democrats have been talking about Republicans as being engaged in a war on women for many years, and it's much easier to push back on that if you have more diverse faces in your caucus. Republicans also recognize that the country is changing, and you have more minorities in the population — more Latinos, particularly, they want to reach out to. And so they do want to elect a more diverse set of members of Congress. And when they do, they are very likely to push them to the front.Where they differ from Democrats, though, is diversity is not as big of a value within the party for elections. On the Democratic side, for a long time, you have an infrastructure of groups like EMILY's List and training organizations which are designed to reach out to women to try to recruit them to run for office and fund them. Republicans don't have that deep bench because it's not something that their donors tend to respond to. So the organizations they have, something called VIEW PAC, Winning For Women. Elise Stefanik really pushed this through her E-PAC, which is her leadership PAC. Those are relatively new, and they don't raise the sums of money that you see being raised by EMILY's List, because their donor base is just not as responsive to those kind of calls.Kevin Kosar: Excellent. Thank you for that. One thing I've come across in the political science literature is that a number of scholars argue, quite persuasively from what I have seen, that women are more effective in Congress. Now, measuring legislative effectiveness is a vexing, complicated thing — we'll put that out there. But, what's your take on the topic?Michele Swers: I'm in agreement with you that it depends on how you're measuring effectiveness and what you mean by effectiveness. I think you can certainly say that there's evidence that women are more active, perhaps more productive. So you have people that look at things like bringing home money to the district and projects to the district. Lazarus and Steigerwalt, in their book Gendered Vulnerability, and Anzia and Berry in their article, they both find that women are more likely to get federal dollars for projects back at home. So if you consider that to be effectiveness, then they're more effective in that way.People who look at bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship, like Craig Volden, Alan Wiseman, Dana Wittmer, and others, do find that women sponsor more bills, they co-sponsor more bills. So they're more active in that way. But there's mixed evidence about how far those bills get. Some of that depends on what are the bills about. So if the bills are about issues like healthcare, those are pretty contentious issues that have a hard time advancing in Congress generally. They find that women, when they're in the minority party, maybe because there's more of a history of consensus building when you're in the minority, that women are passing more of their bills as minority party members. But they don't pass more of their bills as majority party members. This difference gets more stark as we have more polarization in Congress and that consensus-oriented leadership style is less valued.Kevin Kosar: Now, legislative effectiveness is an important topic. But that's not the only thing that matters when we think about legislators in Congress or women in Congress. Your first book, The Difference Women Make, analyzed the House of Representatives. What did you find?Michele Swers: I wrote that book right after — the focus of it was right after that first Year of the Woman, the 1992 elections, when you could have more of an analysis that was more systematic rather than anecdotal interviews. And what I was trying to determine is, there's an assumption in political science that members of Congress, their number one concern is to get reelected. We know that from David Mayhew's <a...