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Analyzing votes on abortion-related legislation from the 103rd (1993–94) to the 115th (2017–18) Congresses, we find that both gender and party influence members' voting behavior. Among Republicans, women are more likely than men to oppose pro-life initiatives, although the impact of gender attenuates over time. Among Democrats, apparent gender differences in voting behavior are explained by the nature of the districts they represent. We also find that the type of abortion issue impacts the influence of gender. Republican women are more likely than Republican men to defect on policies that highlight women's autonomy, such as on bills related to contraception, while Democratic men are more likely than Democratic women to support legislation related to abortion bans. These gender differences reflect a complex dynamic of members' responsiveness to public opinion on specific issues and party efforts to influence that opinion in ways that favor perceptions of party issue expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female legislators, whose numbers continue to grow at the state and federal levels, appear to devote greater attention to the interests of families, women, and children. Women in elective office also tend to exhibit a new leadership style that could change the course of public policy.

Gender discrimination was the greatest obstacle in women's academic career advancement, and the entry of women in the field of political science, was considered as unsuitable. Thoughts and perspectives of women, about their status in political science departments in the southern part of America, are mentioned.

Research indicates that fundraising is not an impediment to women candidates because women raise just as much money as men after accounting for seat status. However, previous research focuses solely on general election candidates. By examining both primary and general election candidates, we find both gender and partisan differences in fundraising. While incumbency, competitiveness, and candidate quality predict fundraising in the general election, we show that Democratic women raise more money than their male counterparts in the primary election. However, Republican women do not enjoy greater fundraising success compared with their male counterparts, and in limited cases, being a Republican woman can be an obstacle to fundraising in the primary election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Sapiro (1981) pointed out many years ago, recognizing that women's interests are interesting is the vital first step in establishing the significance of women's political representation (or the lack thereof)—both in the “real” world and in the scholarly world. Indeed, the assumption that women's interests exist, that women have political interests that can be defined and measured, is central to much of the subsequent research and discussion of women in politics. It is central to our own research on the relationship between women's descriptive and substantive representation (e.g., Reingold 2000; Swers 2002), and it is central to this symposium. Yet we come together in this symposium not simply because we share this assumption, but more tellingly because we all grapple with this assumption. Defining and measuring women's political interests pose a number of very difficult questions or dilemmas, which we elaborate in the following. We highlight these challenges not to dismiss such endeavors as futile or necessarily misguided. Rather, we argue that the very uncertainty surrounding women's interests is what makes them so interesting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on women's standing in the section is comparable to other high-status fields from Congress to law-firm partnerships that require advanced credentials and long hours and reflect a set of institutional norms and investment in mentoring and recruitment.

In this article, the authors discuss the status of women in political science in southern U.S. It states that the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA) monitors the progress of women in political science through surveys on political science department chairs in the region. Furthermore, the survey conducted by the Committee on the Status of Women (CWS) in 2002 reveals that 40% of women are employed at the assistant level, 33% at the associate level, and 19% on full professor ranks.

An abstract regarding the status of women within the electoral politics considering the 1992 and 2002 elections is presented.