Get the Full Story on Women in Election 2024

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, has released its full after-action report on women in the 2024 elections. In this new report, Women in Election 2024: Stalled Progress, CAWP provides data and analysis about last year’s elections, with comparisons to previous cycles, how 2024 fits into the arc of progress towards gender parity in politics, and what lies ahead for women in upcoming elections.

“The 2024 election did not see the rise in women candidates and officeholders that was evident in recent cycles, indicating a slowed pace in women’s representational progress,” said CAWP Director of Research and report author Kelly Dittmar, “But even in an environment of stalled progress in aggregate counts, women still marked new milestones in political representation.”

Women in Election 2024: Stalled Progress is a clearinghouse of analysis of gender in last year’s election, including the following information and more:

• Data on women’s representation at the congressional, statewide executive, and state legislative levels.
• Time series data on women’s representation at these levels over time.
• Analyses of the number of women candidates, nominees, and winners at these levels during the 2024 elections with comparisons to previous cycles, particularly the three most recent elections, along with information on their proportion of all candidates, nominees, and winners.
• Partisan breakdowns for women in the 2024 elections, as well as gender analysis within each party.
• Analysis regarding race and ethnicity for women in the 2024 elections.
• State-by-state breakdowns for women’s representation.
• Win rate analysis by gender and party.
• Analysis about the effect of incumbent departures on women’s representation.

Key themes that emerged in election 2024 include:

• The 2024 election did not mark significant changes in women’s political representation. Election 2024 marked the first time since 2010 that the number of women in Congress dropped as a result of a regular election. The number of women governors momentarily reached a record high in early 2025 only to fall back to match the number serving in 2024. Even in state legislatures, the net gain in women’s representation was smaller than the gains resulting from elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Two more state legislatures, however, reached majority-woman status as a result of the 2024 election: Colorado and New Mexico. They join Nevada as the three states where women currently outnumber men legislature-wide. Women are at or above parity with men in seven individual state legislative chambers.
• Women's presence on the ballot contributes to representational outcomes. The number of women congressional candidates – within and across both parties and chambers – dropped from 2022 to 2024, marking the first drop since 2014. At the state legislative level, the number of women nominees dropped slightly from election 2022 to election 2024, marking the first drop in women state legislative nominees since 2012.
• Progress for women by political party has varied across recent elections. As a result of the 2024 election, Democratic women increased while Republican women decreased as voting members of Congress. In contrast, Republican women saw a net gain in state legislative representation while the number of Democratic women state legislators stayed about level between 2024 and 2025. The majority of women non-incumbent winners to statewide executive offices were Republicans in 2024. Still, Democratic women outnumber Republican women at every level of office, and Democratic women remain a larger proportion of their party’s officeholders; in fact, women are more than 50% of Democratic legislators in 28 state legislatures as of April 2025.
• The racial and ethnic diversity among women candidates and officeholders has grown recently, but progress was limited in election 2024. Women in most racial/ethnic groups saw congressional candidate and nominee counts below previous highs, and no new records were set for women in any single racial/ethnic group in the 119th House. With few opportunities for growth in 2024, the underrepresentation of women of color as both statewide executive candidates and officeholders persisted through the 2024 election. However, the racial and ethnic diversity among women state legislators reached a new high as a result of the 2024 election and for the first time two Black women serve simultaneously in the U.S. Senate.

Women in Election 2024: Stalled Progress is part of the CAWP Reports on Gender and Election series, in which CAWP experts have analyzed women’s role in elections in every cycle since 2018.