Gender and Congressional Voting on Reproductive Health : “Only a Woman Can Know”

Researchers have found that “women are more likely than men to pursue a woman-friendly agenda” (Saidel and Loscocco 2005), and that the relationship between women's representation in government and women-friendly policies is “very strong” (Caiazza 2002). While the research suggests strongly that women in elective office tend to support “women's issues” issues more vigorously than men, there has been scarce attention to the relationship between female legislators and reproductive health and rights issues specifically. Even less attention is paid in the literature to the language employed by male and female legislators when voting on reproductive health matters. This presentation will address the question: "How does a decision-maker's gender influence his or her support for reproductive health?" The paper will analyze a set of key votes taken by the U.S. House of Representatives related to reproductive health over the past two decades to determine the relationship between a member's gender and vote. The results will be presented first in the form of a multivariate correlation analysis, taking into account gender and party affiliation. The second and more substantive part of the presentation will be a comparative content analysis that evaluates floor debates on the same set of congressional votes to understand differences in the discourse employed by male and female legislators. This research contributes to the knowledge base around decision-makers' support for reproductive health issues, and provides a concrete example to test the theories of representative democracy and bureaucracy.