Wealth and Gender in Congress

• In Event: Gender, Representation, and Leadership

Abstract

Research on the political economy of gender has long suggested that female candidates face a professional and economic disadvantage to male candidates: men on average make more money, make up a greater portion of political feeder professions, and may have more extensive professional networks than women. Yet in analyses of Financial Disclosure Statements spanning from 1978-2018, we find that the average woman in Congress tends to be significantly wealthier (almost $250,000 wealthier) than her male counterpart. Why?

We begin by addressing two non-explanations. It's not because women are in general wealthier, either in the general population or in the highest income brackets where most MCs are likely to hail from (Carnes 2013). And it's not because women profit more from office: we show that the wealth gap in Congress does not grow with seniority, for example. We theorize instead that the wealth advantage of women in Congress might be explained by two broad mechanisms, both of which are linked to disadvantages women face outside of Congress.

First, gendered employment patterns produce income disparities within households, and as a result, women tend to have higher-earning spouses than men do. We show using the nationally representative Survey of Consumer Finances that this is broadly true in U.S. households. If these gendered employment patterns are reproduced in households of members of Congress (MCs), then men in Congress may be more likely than women to have stay-at-home spouses and spouses who undertake low-earning occupations. This difference may explain some or all of the wealth gap we observe. We have recently finished collecting and cleaning data on the spousal occupations of all MCs, and expect to have full results shortly.

Second, if gatekeepers—such as voters, the media or donors—are biased against women, creating gendered selection effects, then only unusually qualified women may be elected to Congress (Anzia and Berry 2011, Fulton 2012). If wealth is either one of the important qualifications of office (e.g., because it allows women to campaign more effectively) or a correlate of those qualifications (e.g., because it tends to accrue to capable people), then women MCs may on average be wealthier than men MCs. We thus argue the wealth gap may be an example of Berkson's paradox: if being a woman makes it harder to get into Congress but being wealthy makes it easier, then we should expect women MCs to be wealthier than men MCs.

We examine two possible implications of these selection effects. The first is what we term “over-achieving:” if women must be unusually qualified to win seats, these women may have out-earned and out-performed men in their pre-Congressional careers as well. Through new data collection, we show that women MCs are indeed more likely to have graduated from a top-14 law school than their male peers, and that attending a top-14 law school is associated with higher wealth later in life. The second possibility is dynastic politics: prior research shows that women are more likely to come from dynastic families than men (Dal Bo et al. 2009), and that family dynasties help women overcome some of these biases (Jensenius 2018). If these families are also wealthier, this may explain our finding. Combining existing data from Dal Bo et al. with new data, we show that while dynastic families do produce wealthier MCs, women are not more likely to come from dynastic families (or from wealthier dynastic families) than men during this period. The results have implications both for our understanding of the role of money in politics, and for the role of the political economy of gender and political ambition.

Authors

• Rachel Bernhard, University of California, Davis

• Andrew C. Eggers, Oxford University

• Marko Klasnja, Georgetown University