A Geographic Perspective on Women in Politics

Header artwork by: Maliha Abidi

Continuing the theme of celebrating women's issues through the power of spatial mapping, this project from the Missouri Spatial Data and Information Service aims to examine which House and Senate districts of the state are represented by women and then consider why certain trends exist. By reviewing state level elected offices from a geographic perspective we can begin to think about the way women influence space and politics. Although legal barriers to running for office may be gone, the glass ceiling is still very much intact when it comes to politics.

Several challenges face women's candidacy that are important to acknowledge. Missouri is 50.9% female, while only 26% of state House and Senate seats are held by women. The following maps offer a spatial view of Missouri's Senate and House districts. Female leadership is concentrated to specific regions.

When we combine the two maps and look at an overlay of the data, we see that similar regions of the state are represented by women. Perhaps this is coincidental, but upon a deeper look at the trends and factors affecting female political leadership, there could be something deeper contributing to the unshaded regions on the map.

We can see that female representation is confined largely to more metropolitan areas. When we consider Missouri representatives to the United States House of Representatives in Congress, we can observe a similar trend. Cori Bush (D) represents District 1 in the St. Louis city district, Ann Wagner (R) represents District 2 in St. Louis County, and Vicky Hartzler (R) represents District 4 in the central and western region of the state.

The most northwest region of the state is represented entirely at the federal and state levels by men. The Ozark region of the state sees a similar trend. These regions are also some of the most rural and socially conservative places in Missouri--according to demographics and polling. According to a study conducted by  Pew Research last year , "Democrats … are more than twice as likely as Republicans … to say there are too few women in high political offices (79% vs. 33%)." Predictably, most women in office are Democrats. The New York Times'  Derek Willis wrote last year  that,

"A root cause of the gap is that Democratic women who are potential congressional candidates tend to fit comfortably with the liberal ideology of their party's primary voters, while many potential female Republican candidates do not adhere to the conservative ideology of their primary voters."

These biases create both electoral and self-perceived road blocks to running successful campaigns for office.  A 2012 study by the School of Public Affairs at American University  investigated these perceived challenges that explain why so few women serve in public office. First, women are more likely to perceive the election process as very competitive and biased. Second, women are less likely to think they are qualified to run for office, regardless of how qualified they actually are. Also, women are less likely to receive a recommendation to run for office, and usually, it takes women up to three recommendations to finally consider running. Finally, and perhaps most concretely, women are still responsible for a majority of household tasks and childcare.

This final factor is very telling on a normative level when considering the large amount of time and money required to launch an effective political campaign. For more information on this, please see the  2020 MSDIS map about Women in the Workforce .