In the past few decades there has been heightened interest in and scholarship in incarceration and the incarcerated population in the United States. However, much of this research has surrounded male incarceration rates, often overlooking the growing number of incarcerated women. While male incarceration rates have steadily declined in the past decade with the help of public scrutiny, women have become the fastest-growing incarcerated population. Between 1980 and 2017, the population of incarcerated women has risen by 750% (The Sentencing Project, 2019). Along with the rapid growth, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women face unique challenges in re-entering society and regaining voting rights all of which impact their political representation. To learn more about incarcerated women and political representation read our 2020 brief below. 

https://representwomen.app.box.com/embed/s/gyd1lk7k2hwvmxzsnoht7he14n80sluw?sortColumn=date&view=list8005500

Download 

As research develops around women's political representation it often focuses on national and state levels, sometimes at the expense of other levels of elected representation. One such example of this data gap is women's current and historic political representation and voice within Tribal Nations. RepresentWomen has published preliminary research on a small number of Indigenous Nations in North America; and is in the midst of conducting an investigation into women's representation in the 576 federally recognized Tribal Nations in the 48 contiguous states and the 229 federally recognized Alaskan Native Nations and Corporations. As always RepresentWomen remains culturally humble in our approach to studying other cultures and systems of governance and are open and eager to partner with those who have more expertise. 

infogram_0_e465f915-6cc0-4b0c-a4a0-e841b5ad5a032020 Representation - Tribal Nations - Briefhttps://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed.js?8CEtext/javascript

Since women earned the right to vote 100 years ago, political parties have been looking for ways to engage women in the political process. Both the Democratic and Republican national parties have enacted gender balance rules to attempt to achieve gender parity amongst their state delegates to national conventions. Following these national policies, some state parties have established guidelines for choosing who to send to their state conventions, requiring gender balance at local levels. The team at RepresentWomen has worked with the pro-bono team at Hogan Lovells to research each state party’s rules. The visuals are based on that research. This brief explores the history and the constitutionality of these rules.

Download