A Place at the Table

This research examines the success of women House members in achieving requested committee assignments by using an extensive data set on the committee requests of members of the U.S. House between the 86th and 103rd Congresses. In contrast to previous research, these data allow insight into the committees that women would preferto sit on and the committees that they are assignedto by their party leadership. We hypothesize that the representative structure of the parties' committees-on-committees had important implications for women's success at achieving preferred committee assignments. Our results suggest that women of bothpolitical parties were at a disadvantage in their first term when requesting committee assignments. However, while Democratic women tended to get preferred committee assignments after their first term, Republican women largely failed to move into requested committee assignments.