Women in Congress: Progress is Slow, but Slower if you’re Republican
A visual exploration of historical gender parity in US Congress
Over the past century, women have slowly been making gains in Congress. The 117th Congress, which was inaugurated in 2021, has a record breaking number of women representatives.
However, that number is still only 27%, meaning men make up 73% of today’s Congress. Because the United States population is about 50% women, this means women are underrepresented in Congress by 23%, to this day. In other words, for each man in the U.S., there are 1.46 members of Congress representing him compared to each woman’s 0.54. There are currently 0 non-binary members of Congress.
Gender parity is significantly higher among Democratic Congress members.
In today’s Congress, the Democratic party includes 61% men to 39% women, whereas the Republican party contains only 14% women (86% men). The two parties tracked together for a large amount of time, until the 1990s when the Democratic party started to make significant consistent and upward gains in gender parity, while Republican progress mostly stagnated, leading to today’s 25% gap in women’s representation between the two parties.
Where is gender parity in Congress headed?
Will the trend of increasing representation for women in Congress continue with the election of the 118th US Congress? Will the gap between women’s representation in Democratic and Republican continue to widen or will we see it contract? Women’s representation is on the line in the midterm elections coming up next week — next year, will Congress look more like the country it represents, or less?
These images are from a set of interactive data visualizations created by Mia Szarvas at Two-N, using data from the Brookings Institute Vital Statistics on Congress.
Visit the visualizations here to see higher definition images and focus on specific years.
About the data
The data include only women who were sworn in as members and served more than one day. Figures represent the makeup of Congress on the first day of the session.
The data for the first chart is calculated by comparing the number of women congress members vs. total congress members. Total congress members is calculated as the total number of senate seats plus the total number of house seats, less the vacant seats, for a given session of Congress. This number includes members of all parties, including Democrats, Republicans, and Other. The data for the second chart excludes Other parties, comparing only number of women in each party, Democratic and Republican, as a proportion of the total members of that party.
