Mister Chairman: Reversing Trends for Women Chairing House Committees
Katina Slavkova | February 12, 2025
Last December, shortly before House Majority Leader Steve Scalise released the Republican Steering Committee’s recommendations for committee chairs in the incoming 119th Congress, former Republican representative from Virginia, Barbara Comstock, objected strongly to initial reporting that no women were being selected for these positions. Two days later when the majority leader’s office formally announced the names of the new chairs for 17 standing committees, the list did not include any women from the Republican conference.
House Chairs in the 119th Congress:
This was a notable and strikingly visual change from the previous Congress when three Republican women led House committees. It didn’t help that two of these lawmakers, Reps. Kay Granger (TX) and Cathy McMorris Rogers (WA), who chaired the prestigious Appropriations and Energy and Commerce Committees respectively in the 118th Congress, opted to retire. Perhaps cognizant of the optics and unfavorable public scrutiny, approximately two weeks into this new Congress House Speaker Mike Johnson used his discretion to name the chair of the key Committee on Rules, by selecting Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC) to take its gavel.
Rep. Foxx is now the only woman in charge of a House committee. Though committee leadership is certainly not the only valuable metric by which to judge members’ influence, it’s worth emphasizing that traditionally – and especially in the House as opposed to the Senate – committee work and tenure often serve to cement members’ career trajectory and facilitate their constituent contributions.
Who Gets to Chair Committees?
While a variety of factors determine how House committee assignments are made, the current scarcity of women chairs on House committees appears to be a reflection of the broader and more troubling trend of a stubbornly small share of female representation in the Republican conference overall. It’s not surprising then that the math simply doesn’t work. Elevating women to these leadership posts requires a sufficiently large pool of candidates to begin with. Over time, a persistent under-representation among the rank and file will naturally translate to a scarcity at the top. It has taken women a long time to not only chair committees, but notably to chair committees of greater consequence; we could be seeing the signs of a step backwards.
According to current data from The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University there are only 31 Republican women serving in the House right now, compared to 94 on the Democratic side. For House Republican women, this number is actually slightly lower than the previous two Congresses. And while 31 is not necessarily low by historical standards (especially considering that as recently as the 116th Congress (2019-2021) that number had dropped to the low teens), the yawning numbers gap between Democratic and Republican women in the House is not shrinking.
History of Women Committee Chairs:
Looking at the data, it’s clear that for a long time there was generally a rough parity between the two parties in electing women to the House (with some minor exceptions in the 1970s). But starting in the 1990s, things began to diverge more significantly and the gap has been exacerbated ever since. One glaring problem is that while the number of Democratic women in the House has been growing pretty steadily every election cycle, with only a few off years, the share of their Republican counterparts has seesawed considerably, often negating gains made in previous years. This has further complicated what is already a stubbornly difficult issue to resolve. Not only are fewer Republican women being elected to the House to begin with, but even these lower numbers are not being sustained on a more consistent basis. What this and other data on women’s representation more broadly in Congress seem to suggest is that this has now become, at least in part, a “partisan problem.”
The Difference Women Make:
As congressional scholars such as Michele Swers have shown, women in Congress aren’t just descriptive representation, giving a visual representation of a group’s inclusion, but have a distinct, substantive impact on policymaking. Our current political environment certainly has many issues, from reproductive rights and beyond, that are of crucial interest to women and require womens’ voices in the democratic process.
Several years ago I wrote about the challenges of including women’s voices in national security oversight debates in Congress. I noted that in addition to the lack of women chairs, often committees with national security jurisdiction performed dismally in metrics such as taking testimony from female expert witnesses. Now that the 119th Congress has begun with only one woman chair in the House chamber perhaps it’s time to reexamine this issue and broaden the scope to more committees.
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