The Center for American Women and Politics was founded to examine and disrupt the gender bias built into America’s political institutions. But these institutions – formal and informal – were also constructed to privilege whiteness. To uphold that privilege, entire communities have been dehumanized, exploited, endangered, and disempowered. Our work has made...

These days, hand-shaking, baby kissing, and door-knocking are scary and flout social distancing rules. The traditional ways candidates literally reach out and touch voters have been put on hold due to the coronavirus. No more direct contact means it’s necessary to master the art of being a virtual candidate. Making the shift to online campaigning isn’t as...

This post is part of a series on teaching students about women and American politics. See the first post in the series, Engaging Students Online: Resources and Activities on Women in American Politics , here . As more parents and educators adapt to our new reality of online learning, many are searching for educational topics that will keep the children in...

This post is based on the author's live webinar presentation: “Campaigning During COVID, Part I”, as offered by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Download and follow along with the accompanying Power Point presentation . Part II’s webinar will be on Campaign Tactics and...

This post is the beginning of a series on teaching students about women in American politics. Stay tuned for more posts in the series with resources and activities geared toward students K-12. You can also check out the CAWP Teach a Girl to Lead ® initiative for more teaching tools and activity ideas. The past few weeks have seen K-12 schools and colleges...

Every year, the Center for American Women and Politics supports an internship through the Rutgers-Eagleton Washington Internship Award Program that provides financial assistance to interns in the nation’s capital. This is made possible due to the generosity of Susan N. Wilson in establishing the Katherine K. Neuberger Legacy Fund in honor of her mother, a...

Fifty years to the day that Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, five new Black women won seats in the U.S. House. In January, they will join 17 other incumbent Black women representatives, two Black women delegates, and one Black woman senator to represent the largest cohort of Black congresswomen to ever serve in...

In this record-setting year for women candidates, all eyes are on the campaign trail. But what happens when women are elected? In our new book A Seat at the Table: Congresswomen’s Perspectives on Why Their Presence Matters (Oxford 2018), we use personal interviews we conducted with more than two-thirds of the women serving in the 114 th Congress (2015-2017)...

Just under a month ago, Ohio State Representative Emilia Sykes filed a complaint with the Ohio Department of Public Safety for over two years of disparate treatment by security officials at the Statehouse. More specifically, Representative Sykes – one of ten Black women in the Ohio state legislature – cited heightened scrutiny at security checkpoints and...

Media reports frequently confuse the women's vote and the gender gap, actually reporting on the women’s vote but calling it the gender gap. To clarify: the gender gap in voting is the difference between the proportions of women and men who support a given candidate, generally the leading or winning candidate. It is the gap between the genders, not within a...