Women's Political Representation: The Importance of Ideology

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Women's low rate of participation at the highest levels of politics is an enduring problem in gender stratification. Previous cross-national research on women in national legislatures has stressed three explanations for differences in women's political representation: social structure, politics, and ideology. Despite strong theory suggesting the importance of ideology, it has not found support in previous cross- national statistical studies. But ideology has not been as well measured as structural and political factors. In this article, we demonstrate that gender ideology strongly affects the number of women in national legislatures. We do so by introducing a newly available measure of national gender ideology into a cross-national model of women in legislatures. We demonstrate that ideology, when measured more precisely, strongly predicts differences in women's political representation. Despite advances in women's levels of education and participation in the paid economy over the last 20 years (Clark, Ramsbey & Adler 1991; Jacobs 1996), women have made little significant progress with respect to their representation in national politics. In the U.S., women compose 46% of the paid labor force and 55% of tertiary students (United Nations 2000). However, their representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate remains 13% and 14%, respectively. The situation is similar in other nations. Currently 182 countries allow women to run for office. Yet women constitute less than 20% of elected representatives in the great majority of these countries. Women's