Gender Differences in the General Assembly: A Case Study of the Ohio Legislature

It would be preferable to examine the interactions between gender and other factors such as race, ethnicity, and class (see Cammissa and Reingold 2004) ; regrettably, the data used in this study do not provide enough observations to allow this. Despite this shortcoming, the findings do provide an interesting mix of evidence that while women have attained some parity with men in the legislature, some disparities in attitudes and activities identified in studies from the l 960s-I 970s remain significant. The data for this paper come from fonnally structured interviews conducted in 1993 with members of both houses of the Ohio General Assembly and are part of a larger data set compiled by the Chio Legislative Research Project (OLRP) --a study of legislative politics in the state of Ohio. 1 The OLRP conducted extensive personal interviews, consisting of open-ended and closed questions, with 126 (95 percent) of the 132 members of the I 19th Ohio General Assembly. The questions cover a wide range of topics including demographic characteristics, background and experience, opinions about working in the legislature, and committee work. Although the data used in this study were collected in 1993, they are recent enough to be informative. Most of the latest studies delving into this area use data collected prior to 1993 (e. g. Reingold 2000; Thomas 1992, 1994; Thomas and Welch 1991), thus the findings from this research provide a useful supplement to our existing knowledge. The Ohio General Assembly is a fairly professionalized legislative body. As measured by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), the Ohio legislature ranks among the top eleven states in terms of compensation, amount of time spent on the job, the number of staff, and the length of time in session (NCSL 2004). Ohio lawmakers are considered full-time legislators and in 2003 earned an average of 53, 706 per year (NCSL 2003). Currently, approximately twenty percent of the members of the Ohio General Assembly are women, which is slightly below the national average of 22. 5 percent (NCSL 2005). II. Prior Research and Current Expectations Career PathEarlier studies show that women enter political office in a less direct career trajectory than their male colleagues. The first women state legislators tended to raise families, and perform volunteer civic or party work before aspiring to public office (Johnson and Carroll 1978;Kirkpatrick 1974;Werner 1968). As a result, women typically find their way into politics at ages older than men (CA WP 2001;Diamond 1977;Thomas 1994). Yet, men and women legislators, for some time, have been equally likely to hold prior political office (Carroll and Strimling 1983;Diamond 1977).