The best areas of the country for women's representation in elected office are the Pacific and New England regions, while the South and Middle Atlantic continue to fall behind.
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Part of this discrepancy may have to do with how likely these regions are to vote Democratic. Fifteen of the 17 states with Gender Parity Scores of C or above either voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election or currently have two Democratic senators, a fact that reinforces the extent to which Republican women are underrepresented in our government.
According to our Gender Parity Index Report for 2019, there is a correlation between women's representation and geographic location. The states ranked in the bottom ten GPIs are generally clustered in the Southeast and Mid-West. The majority of states with top ten GPIs are located on the West Coast.
Women's representation is not entirely dependent on geography or partisanship, but these two factors - which are highly correlated with each other - both play an important role.
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