daughters
Thanks, Daddy's little girl!
Congressmen with daughters are more likely to support
women's rights, including abortion.
Katharine Mieszkowski
Feb. 10, 2006 | We're all for electing more women to
Congress.
[http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa121198.htm]
But while the ratio of men to women serving there
remains stuck in the Stone Age, there's a group of
unrecognized female power brokers wielding influence
on the Hill -- the daughters of congressmen.
Ebonya Washington,
[http://www.econ.yale.edu/faculty1/washington.htm] an
economist at Yale University, analyzed the records of
men in Congress who have daughters compared with those
of their daughterless colleagues, and found some
surprising results among both Republicans and
Democrats. As Washington Post columnist Richard Morin
reported
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020701736.html]
this week: "She found that members of the House who
have a daughter voted more liberally on a range of
women's issues, notably abortion, than those who did
not. Moreover, the more daughters a congressman had,
the more likely he was to vote for reproductive
rights."
And what about the women in Congress? Did having
daughters correlate with how they voted on these
issues? As Morin notes parenthetically: "(There were
not enough female lawmakers to allow Washington to
draw firm conclusions about them.)" Sigh.
Maybe some of those congressmen's daughters will be
inspired by their dads' careers to run for office one
day, too.
-- Katharine Mieszkowski
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