How Many Male Members Are in the House of Representatives
Women make upward just over a quarter of all members of the 117th Congress – the highest per centum in U.South. history and a considerable increment 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% increase from the 96 women who were serving in the 112th Congress a decade ago, though it remains far below the female share of the overall U.S. population. A record 120 women are serving in the newly elected House, accounting for 27% of the total. In the Senate, women hold 24 of 100 seats, i fewer than the record number of seats they held in the last Congress.
This analysis counts voting also every bit nonvoting members of Congress. Figures for the 117th Congress exclude two House seats that were vacant every bit of early January. It as well excludes Sens. Kamala Harris, who is expected to resign her seat ahead of her inauguration as vice president on January. 20, and Kelly Loeffler, who lost a runoff ballot in Georgia earlier this month. Both are gear up to be replaced by men.
This analysis builds on earlier Pew Research Centre work to analyze the gender makeup of Congress.
In the House, one New York race has non been called yet, and one 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. three, 2021, so 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 arise to the vice presidency this month, we are not including her in the count of female person senators. We are, however, counting her seat equally Democrat-held because a Democrat has been named to accept her place.
For historical information on Congress, nosotros used information from the Biographical Directory of the U.s. Congress, the U.S. Firm of Representatives Office of the Historian, the Congressional Research Service's "Women in the United States Congress, 1917-2014" and CQ Roll Telephone call. For 2020-21 ballot results, we used data from Ballotpedia and the Associated Press, also every bit news reports.
Women make up a much bigger share of congressional Democrats (38%) than Republicans (14%). Beyond both chambers, at that place are 106 Democratic women and 38 Republican women in the new Congress. Women account for forty% of House Democrats and 32% of Senate Democrats, compared with fourteen% of House Republicans and sixteen% of Senate Republicans.
The 2022 full general election sent just one new congresswoman to the Senate, Republican Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, making her the offset female person senator to represent that state.
Republican women made significant gains in the House in the most recent election cycle. Of the 27 newly elected representatives who are women, two-thirds (xviii) are Republicans. Between the 115th and 116th Congresses, the number of GOP women in the Business firm cruel from 25 to 15. That number doubled this twelvemonth to xxx, the highest total ever.
California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and the first female speaker of the House, is serving her fourth term as speaker after being reelected earlier this month.
The partisan gender sectionalization hasn't always looked this way. Until the 1929 stock marketplace crash, about of the dozen women elected to the Firm were Republicans, and for several decades afterward the two parties were more often than not close in numbers in that chamber. But the gap widened in the 1970s and has persisted, despite a temporary narrowing during the Reagan-Bush-league 1980s. Of the 232 women elected to the House in 1992 or later, 157 (68%) have been Democrats, every bit 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 than a century. The kickoff, Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana, was elected to the House in 1916, two years later her land gave women the vote. Just it's merely been in the past few decades that women have served in more substantial numbers. About two-thirds of the women ever elected to the Business firm (232 of 352, including the newest members of the 117th Congress) accept been elected in 1992 or later.
The pattern is like in the Senate: 42 of the 58 women who have always served in the Senate – including Lummis, the newest female senator – took office in 1992 or later.
The 19th Amendment, which extended the franchise to women across the nation, was ratified in 1920. That November, Alice Mary Robertson of Oklahoma became the first woman to defeat an incumbent congressman. (She lost the seat back to him 2 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 first-ever female senator, though she only served for a twenty-four hours.
While women remained scarce in the Senate well into the 1980s, their numbers gradually, though not consistently, increased in the House – more often than not paralleling the expansion of women's roles in social club more than broadly. In 1928, 7 women were elected to the 71st Congress, a tape at the time, and two more than joined them afterwards via special ballot. But that tendency plateaued during the Cracking Depression and World War Ii. It wasn't until after the war that the upwards trajectory of women in Congress resumed, with 18 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 modify much until 1981, when their Firm caucus exceeded xx members for the first time. The big jump, however, came in 1992 – subsequently dubbed "The Year of the Adult female" – when four new female person senators and 24 new congresswomen were elected. Academics accept 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 backlash from the Clarence Thomas-Anita Colina hearings.
'Widow's succession' in Congress
Well into the 1970s, one of the nigh mutual means for a adult female to enter Congress was by succeeding her deceased husband or father, either by ballot or date. Of the 90 women who served in the Business firm between 1916 and 1980, 31 were initially elected to their husband'south seat after he died; three were called to supercede their husbands on the ballot when the men died before Election Day; and one, Winnifred Bricklayer Huck of Illinois, was elected in 1922 to fill up the last 4 months of her late male parent'south term. (Another early congresswoman, Katherine Gudger Langley of Kentucky, won her husband's seat in 1926 after he resigned following his conviction for violating Prohibition laws.)
Like Langley, most of the holders of these so-called "widow'due south succession" seats stayed in Congress for only a term or two. Simply some went on to distinguished careers on Capitol Loma. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, for example, won a special election in 1940 to fill the last seven months of her husband'southward term. Smith went on to win iv full House terms on her own, then was elected to four terms in the Senate, thereby becoming the first woman to serve in both chambers. Lindy Boggs, who was elected to her husband'south seat in 1973 later he was presumed killed in a plane crash, served almost 18 years. She later on was named U.South. ambassador to the Holy See.
Six of the xiv women who served in the Senate before 1980 were either elected or appointed to make full their belatedly husbands' seats. Of those, only two (Hattie Caraway of Arkansas and Maurine Brown Neuberger of Oregon) later on won total terms in their own right.
Note: This is an update of a postal service 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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