Fewer women will serve on Capitol Hill, but they’re setting new records in the states

The new year brings a mixed picture for women’s political representation – the highest glass ceiling in American politics remains intact, but female governors and state legislators are setting new records.

The number of women in Congress is decreasing but not by much. Overall, 150 women will serve on Capitol Hill in the new Congress, down from the record of 152 set in 2024. It’s the first time since the 2016 election that there won’t be a net gain in women’s congressional representation as a result of an election, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University (CAWP).

Partisan differences are more revealing: Democratic women in Congress overall and in the US House are setting new records, despite their party losing both chambers. The number of GOP women is decreasing in the House and Congress overall but staying the same in the Senate.

“We should be alert to any drop when women are so underrepresented,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at CAWP. But she describes 2024 as a “stasis election” for women’s representation in Congress.

“It’s not that we saw women lose at some horrific rates,” she said.

Some of the decline this cycle can be traced back to the high number of women in the 118th Congress who departed. And it’s not all bad news – several women didn’t run for reelection to the House, for example, because they were running for higher office, with mixed results, or are running in 2025.

And despite the number of women in the Senate holding steady, the 119th session marks an important milestone: For the first time, two Black women (Democrats Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland) will serve at the same time.

While Vice President Kamala Harris fell short of the Oval Office, women in executive office are setting a record – with 13 female governors set to serve in 2025 after the election of Republican Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire. (President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, however, could change that.)

Further down the ticket, 2,467 women across the country will serve in state legislatures – more than ever before, according to CAWP. That’s still just about a third of legislators – more than the roughly quarter of Congress that is female – but similarly far short of the 53% of the 2024 electorate that was female.

Republican women see declines in Congress

Women’s representation in Congress is lopsided toward Democrats.

And one of the starkest partisan differences, Dittmar said, can be seen among the non-incumbent winners in the House: Only two are Republican women, compared to 16 Democrats.

“In a year when Democrats didn’t fare well, women were still more likely to succeed as Democratic non-incumbents,” she said.

Part of that backstory, Dittmar noted, is that more of the incumbents who departed the 118th Congress were Democrats.

“I don’t think there’s something that shows that, writ large, women have heightened challenges in this moment,” Dittmar said. “But I would say for Republican women, it is a concern that we are back to a low number.”

Women’s lower numbers in the new Congress didn’t start with the November election results. After several cycles that broke records for the number of female candidates, there was a decline across parties and chambers in 2024, but especially among GOP women.

Of course, it wasn’t just women – the number of male candidates dropped, too, amid a narrow House battlefield and the squeeze for resources that a presidential cycle puts on down-ballot candidates. Still, even as a percentage of total House candidates, women were down from 2022, with Republicans taking the steepest percentage hit.

“We still have work to do,” said Lauren Zelt, executive director of Maggie’s List. “Groups like Maggie’s List are working really hard to elect conservative women for office, but we could use more support from the party committees and others that get involved in races very early in trying to identify strong female candidates.”

Six of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s final 35 “Young Gun” candidates – those who have met various metrics for support and are regarded as strong recruits in competitive seats – were women during the 2024 cycle. None of them won.

It’s often been easier to elect women in purple seats, said Danielle Barrow, executive director of Winning for Women, which works to elect GOP women. But that’s left them more vulnerable each cycle because they’re in the most competitive races.

“The most glaring opportunity going forward: the retirements. … That’s where we need to be putting some serious energy,” said Barrow, who noted that raising money, especially small-dollar fundraising, is still the biggest challenge.

The good news for GOP women looking to make long-term gains is that their incoming House freshmen – Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota and Sheri Biggs of South Carolina – won open seats in safe Republican districts. The primaries in those seats are often the only contests that matter, but they’ve traditionally been harder for women to win.

“That’s a tricky task for Republicans because we don’t have the same rallying cry that Democrats do,” Barrow said, noting that identity politics isn’t salient on her side of the aisle.

Fedorchak, who serves on the state’s public service commission, became the first woman elected to North Dakota’s at-large district. She doesn’t think gender was a big issue in the five-way primary, which she won with nearly 50% of the vote against mostly men.

But her early conversations with another female Republican lawmaker – Oklahoma Rep. Stephanie Bice – were influential before she even decided to run.

“That was kind of a turning point for me,” said Fedorchak. “I felt like, ‘Oh, she’s like I am,’” she said. “If there’s more people like her in Washington, then I can definitely get out there, build relationships, and we can get something done,” she remembers thinking.

Ups and downs in women’s representation

Republicans who work to elect women have long said it’s the quality – not quantity – of their female members that’s important. But without any women chairing committees in the new House, they’re also losing one key source of institutional power.

Two women wielded House gavels in the 118th Congress. But the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers is retiring, while the Education Committee’s Virginia Foxx is term-limited in the position. Several Republican women, however, are in position to chair committees in the Senate, including Maine’s Susan Collins atop the powerful Appropriations Committee.

Women’s growth in Congress hasn’t been linear for either party, with Barrow pointing out that Democrats have had the infrastructure to recruit and elect women for a lot longer.

Some election cycles have been giant leaps forward, with record numbers of women running for, and winning, elections. In 1992, for example, a wave of women ran for office in the wake of Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and a record 24 non-incumbent women were elected to the House, according to CAWP.

That record held until the 2018 midterms, when a surge of female candidates motivated by Trump’s 2016 victory sent 36 non-incumbent women to the House. (All but one were Democrats.)

“It was a sea change,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILY’s List, which formed in 1985 to help elect Democratic women who support abortion rights. “As those women come into politics … it creates a foundation that we’re building from.”

The 2018 cycle was a wake-up call for Republican leadership. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, then the first female recruitment chair at the NRCC, had enlisted more than 100 women to run and just one of them won. The electoral success of Democratic women also inspired some conservative women to get involved, and after the next election, GOP women shattered their record for non-incumbent winners with 19, according to CAWP.

Even though the non-incumbent House GOP number is falling 89% from that record high four years ago, a longer lens provides a fuller picture of Republican women’s growth over time. The 40 GOP women who will serve in the 119th Congress, for example, is nearly double the 21 who served at the end of 2010.

And while Trump picking Stefanik – the House GOP conference chair – to be his UN ambassador will decrease Republican women’s numbers in the House, assuming she’s confirmed, Zelt is also encouraged by the number of women Trump has tapped for his administration.

Besides Susie Wiles, who will be the first female White House chief of staff, he’s also chosen women to serve as attorney general, director of national intelligence, small business administrator and secretaries of Agriculture, Labor, Homeland Security and Education.

“That gives me a lot of hope that more women will feel comfortable coming forward to run,” Zelt said of the female Cabinet picks.

Women break records in state legislatures

Both Republicans and Democrats are breaking records for the number of female state legislators this year, according to CAWP, but the net gain after the 2024 election is smaller than after some previous elections.

That’s in part, Dittmar said, because women’s gains are often tied to Democratic performance.

Women are expected to be about 50% of Democratic state legislators, according to CAWP’s preliminary data, but only about 20% of Republican legislators.

Three states will have majority-women legislatures in 2025: Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. All of them have Democratic majorities and, as Dittmar noted, they have state-based programs to recruit and help female candidates.

State Sen. Lisa Cutter is part of that majority in Colorado.

“When I went to the legislature, I was shocked at the level of misogyny I felt,” said Cutter, who was first elected to the state House in 2018. “It wasn’t necessarily mean or necessarily intentional. It was just the power structures and good ol’ boys’ network,” she said, recalling her transition from working in communications to government.

There was the video call on which a male colleague was praised for making a point she had made earlier. Or when lawmakers sought out a male cosponsor of legislation that she had clearly spearheaded.

Gender parity in the legislature – which women briefly achieved in 2023 – didn’t change that, Cutter said. “The systems are so ingrained, and the power structure is so ingrained.”

Calling herself an “agitator,” Cutter said she’s started a Democratic women’s caucus and urges women to speak up for each other across chambers now that she’s in the Senate. “My opinion is that what will help it change is us standing up and busting out of what everyone thinks we need to be.”

In New Mexico, incoming Democratic state Rep. Sarah Silva didn’t initially run for the seat, but in late July she received a call asking if she’d considering replacing her party’s nominee, who’d stepped down for health reasons. She went on to win by about 150 votes, joining the class that tipped the gender balance in the legislature.

As she prepares to take office, she is reminded of 1992 when, as a middle schooler, she watched the first “year of the woman” unfold.

“I just remember seeing these women on the cover of a magazine, everyone talking about it and how exciting and different that felt,” Silva said. “That was really formative for me and that memory keeps coming up as I think about my own path to leadership.”

Leaning into their experiences on the campaign trail

To get more women to run, women’s experiences need to be treated as an asset, said Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who bested Republican Joe Kent in 2022 and again in 2024 in a southwest Washington district that voted for Trump. When she first ran for office, she said, a consultant laughed when she said she had an 8-month-old baby and joked she wouldn’t have time to see him.

“This place was not designed for moms. It wasn’t designed for people with young kids,” she said. “But, learning how to navigate it – it is, I think, an asset to have a child and really be going through the same things that my constituents are going through.”

Democratic Rep.-elect Janelle Bynum, who flipped a nearby seat in Oregon, offered three tips to candidates with children: Use a calendar, get good childcare and lean into their personal stories.

“When I finally started talking about the things that I was experiencing as a mom, the things that my children were experiencing, that was when my campaign went from a level two to a level nine, because it became more authentic, it became relatable,” Bynum said.

Fedorchak, who first got involved in public service in her 20s, considered running for Congress the last time the North Dakota seat was open, but the timing wasn’t right for her family. This year, she said, “My kids were in my ear saying, ‘Mom, why wouldn’t you do this?’”

The incoming GOP congresswoman said she didn’t feel any obstacles to running as a woman. “My strongest advocates in the Republican Party have been my male mentors,” she said. But she pointed to having kids as a potential complication for women looking to represent a district far from Washington, DC.

“In a state like North Dakota, where you’re two flights from home every weekend,” Fedorchak said, “that’s a big obstacle.”

What comes next after Trump’s return?

One of the big questions moving forward is whether Trump’s return will inspire more female candidates to run, like they did after he first won power in 2016.

“My hypothesis is that, on the one hand, the environment to see heightened involvement of women – as candidates or other ways, other types of political activism – is very similar to post-2016,” Dittmar said.

“The conditions are similar, but where the question mark is, is: Are people who have been on the frontlines, who are predominantly women and women of color, is there an exhaustion?”

The early – and limited – evidence would suggest no. Since the November election, at least 11,626 people have signed up with Run for Something, which helps recruit young progressive and diverse candidates for elected offices below the congressional level. That alone suggests increased momentum from four years ago. In all of 2017, the first year of the group’s existence, just 15,000 people had signed up expressing similar interest in running for office.

“The enthusiasm for people saying, ‘I want to think about running’ has been remarkable,” said Sara Hadad, Run for Something’s chief strategy officer. And she noted that women hitting parity in state legislatures sends an important message for recruitment.

“I think everyone took a beat and grieved and did what they needed to do, but now I think people are used to being organized,” said Cutter, who first decided to run for state office after Trump’s 2016 election and getting involved in her local women’s march.

“People really recognized that we needed to invest after 2016,” she added. “And so now, I think it’s more like here we go again.”

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