RNC Speakers: By the Numbers

Kelly Dittmar

presidential gender watch 2016In April 2015, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation (BLFF) and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) launched Presidential Gender Watch 2016, a project to track, analyze, and illuminate gender dynamics in the 2016 presidential election. With the help of expert scholars and practitioners, Presidential Gender Watch worked for 21 months to further public understanding of how gender influences candidate strategy, voter engagement and expectations, media coverage, and electoral outcomes in campaigns for the nation’s highest executive office. The blog below was written for Presidential Gender Watch 2016, as part of our collective effort to raise questions, suggest answers, and complicate popular discussions about gender’s role in the presidential race.

 

Last Friday, we did a preliminary count of the Republican National Convention’s speakers by gender, finding that women were 32 percent of announced speakers. However, by our count, there were 111 speakers over the RNC’s four days, not counting invocations, benedictions, or narrative videos. Of those 111 speakers, 31 – or 28 percent – were women; 80 – or 72 percent – were men.

Eight of the 31 female speakers – or 26 percent – were currently elected women, and one more – Linda Lingle – is the former Governor of Hawaii. Elected officials were better represented among the men who spoke at the RNC; 34 of 80 male speakers – or 43 percent – are currently holding elected office. Three other men who spoke held previous elected office. This is not terribly surprising if you look at the gender disparities among Republican elected officeholders nationwide. Just 17 percent of Republican state legislators, 10 percent of Republican governors, and 9 percent of Republican members of Congress are women.

Gender disparities persist in how long men and women were at the convention podium. Of about 13.75 hours of speaking, just over 10 hours was occupied by male speakers at the RNC; women’s spoke for just under 3.5 hours – 24 percent of the total speaking time – across the convention’s four days. If Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s acceptance speeches – totaling one hour and 52 minutes – are removed from the calculations, men spoke about 72 percent of the time, matching their representation among speakers overall.

Stay tuned as we track gender differences in number of speakers and speaking time at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia next week.

Kelly Dittmar headshot

Kelly Dittmar

Kelly Dittmar is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers–Camden and Director of Research and Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. She is the co-author of A Seat at the Table: Congresswomen’s Perspectives on Why Their Representation Matters (Oxford University Press, 2018) (with Kira Sanbonmatsu and Susan J. Carroll) and author of Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns (Temple University Press, 2015).

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