While young female voters seem to agree that the gender of an elected official is not the utmost important criteria to base a vote on, studies show that it might be something to at least consider.
“Political science research has found this over and over again: Women legislators are more likely to introduce legislation that specifically benefits women,” Sarah Kliff wrote in an article for Vox. “They’re better at bringing funding back to their home districts. And, to put it bluntly, they just get more shit done: A woman legislator, on average, passed twice as many bills as a male legislator in one recent session of Congress.”
Women bring different backgrounds and experiences with them to Congress, having faced different obstacles than men in achieving success — and in winning office. Their unique perspectives often shape how they govern and what issues they dedicate their terms to addressing.
For example, today there are 104 female members of Congress, over three times more than there were twenty-five years ago. As a result, our political conversations have continually shifted towards policies that relate to women directly — paid family leave, women’s health, prosecuting violence against women — and the number of female-authored bills being passed tends to be higher than male-authored ones. In addition, congresswomen have done a better job at securing federal money for their districts, receiving on average an additional $49 million annually than districts represented by men.
Can we expect Hillary Clinton to be a more productive president then than the 43 men before her? Her husband, along with other DNC speech-givers, seems to think so, calling her “the best darn change-maker I ever met in my entire life.” The problem, however, is that speech after speech lacked specific examples of what she’s actually been able to change — and there’s a reason.
In her eight years as a senator, only one of Clinton’s bills got enacted into law, a bill to rename a U.S. courthouse in New York City as the “Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse.” The rest of her Senate career is defined by eleven other safe, noncontroversial bills, none of which she was even able to get passed. Until becoming the first female major party presidential nominee, her greatest, most revolutionary accomplishment was renaming a courthouse.
“Hillary wasn’t much of a change-maker in the U.S. Senate,” Nicole Goeser and John R. Lott, Jr. wrote for the National Review. “Given all of the insight she must have gained as first lady, one might have expected her to be better at pushing legislation. She intimately knew all of the players, had Bill by her side, and had access to the tremendous wealth of the Clinton Foundation.”
Her time as a lawmaker, however, was marked by virtually no legislative achievements, including no bills aimed at taking care of children or equal pay or protecting victims of domestic violence, despite her 2016 “feminist” talking points. It’s no wonder then that millennial women, even ones who belong to her own party, are having trouble finding her all-talk-no-action record inspiring, despite data showing that a female president could be good for the country.
