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About five percent of American political office holders are women. On this indicator of women's status, the United States approximates the worldwide norm (Putnam, 1976). A central research question for those who study women's political roles is why, given the lack of legal or obvious structural barriers to recruitment of female elites, are women still so underrepresented among political officials. The literature on women and politics offers a number of plausible answers.
Virginia Sapiro (1981) studied this question.