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Advice to Republicans: Nominate women
“Where are all the Republican women?” Politico’s David Bernstein asked in a 2016 article.
The number of Republican women in the U.S. House has decreased from 25 in the 109th Congress (2005–2007) to 21 in the 115th Congress (2017–2019). The number of Democratic women, in contrast, has gone from 46 to 62 in that same period.
According to The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University, this partisan disparity has been growing at all levels of government, with Democrats electing more women and the Republicans fewer.
How could the party of U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley and Iowa Senator Joni Ernst and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez let this happen?
Three explanations have generally been offered to explain the dearth of elected Republican women:
(1) The Democrats are viewed as the party of women’s rights and, as a matter of policy, have prioritized getting women elected.
(2) There are more Democratic women with the backgrounds typically associated with political careers. Political scientists Melody Crowder-Meyer and Benjamin E. Lauderdale found in their 2014 study that “the proportion of women in the Democratic pool of potential candidates is now two to three times larger than in the Republican pool of potential candidates.”
