Women Lawmakers, State Mandates and Women's Health

This research examines whether states with higher female representation in the legislature will be innovators in women's health policy. The issue of health policy was chosen due to increasing state legislative activity in health care, especially in response to citizen dissatisfaction with HMOs and PPOs. We use nine health policies to create an index of women's health mandates for the fifty states and Ordinary Least Squares Regression to test a number of explanations for policy adoptions. Previous research suggests women state legislators play an important role in placing policy issues of concern to women on the political agenda. Contrary to the literature and our expectations, female representation and leadership in state legislatures, the presence of a women's caucus, women chairs of health care committees, and the pace at which women have been elected to state legislatures over the past four decades were not related to policy adoptions. Similarly, the growth and size of the managed care industry did not explain the pattern of policy adoptions. What did seem to matter was the size of the medical establishment and Democratic party control. While women's interest groups may be critical in increasing awareness of the issues, findings of the empirical study suggest women's health policy is widely supported by both men and women state lawmakers. When the policies were disaggregated by type, the percentage of women in leadership positions was associated with the adoption of specific women's health policies with a univer-sal appeal, such as reconstructive breast surgery and extended maternity stays.