Money and Power: The Effects of the Gender Wage Gap on Women in State Legislatures

University Hall, Rm 134

Countless factors play into an individual’s decision to run for public office. This is true of everyone regardless of gender, but it seems especially true of women. Women in the United States have undeniable pressures keeping them out of the public sphere. In this research paper, I propose that the primary obstacle women face in their potential political candidacy is the gender wage gap. I test this hypothesis using OLS regression on a time-series cross sectional model with data collected from the US Census Bureau and the National Conference of State Legislatures. I compare the relationship between the gender wage gap in each state and the percentages of women in state legislatures from 2010 to 2017. My control variables are the ratios of women in state populations and the level of partisanship in each state. My results suggest that my hypothesis is supported at the 99.9% confidence level, and that the gender wage gap does greatly influence the number of women in state legislatures. That is, as states come closer to gender wage parity, they see higher rates of women in their legislatures and vice versa. These findings emphasize the importance of female representation in the public and economic spheres and expand the range of the extant literature, which is particularly sparse on the relationships between these variables.