Overburdened or Underutilized: An Examination of Women’s Committee Assignments

• In Event: Legislative Effectiveness

Abstract

Scholarship examining the relationship between women and committee assignments in legislative institutions has often focused on the type of committees that women serve on though there has been far less focus on the extent of committee service women are assigned to in a legislature. In this paper I build a theoretical framework to explain under what institutional and contextual conditions women will be overburdened with committee service as compared to men. I hypothesize that when there are few women in the legislature and there are no institutional constraints on committee service, female legislators will be assigned to serve on a greater number of committees than their male counterparts. Further, I expect that women will have decreased policy productivity and success navigating policy throughout the policymaking process in chambers where they are overburdened with committee service. I test my theoretical expectations using a dataset of state legislators’ committee assignments in 99 state legislative chamber over two sessions. The finds of this study will have implications for our understanding of the effects of institutional design, legislative efficiency and representation.

Author

• Tessa Provins, University of Arizona