Higher percentage of women in EU Parliament than in US Congress
All federal programs promoting diversity, equity, inclusion should be scrapped according to one of the first executive orders by new US president Donald Trump. Just a couple of weeks after this order, new US data shows that women make up 28% of voting members in the 119th US Congress – on par with their share in the last Congress, but a considerable increase from where things stood even 10 years ago. The share of women elected as members of the European Parliament at the recent European elections is 38.5%, down from 39.8%, the Parliament’s data shows.
Research on the influence of media coverage of women candidates and politicians, both globally and in Europe, shows that under- and misrepresentation of women in media has a negative impact on women’s aspirations and electoral success, but higher media visibility can help to get more women elected, the European Parliament argues in an earlier compilation of gender data.
“Social media platforms can give women candidates and politicians a direct channel to reach the public and avoid gender-biased media coverage, but they can be far from ‘women-friendly”, the Parliament says..
An International Parliamentary Union survey of women parliamentarians also shows that ‘social media have become the number one place in which psychological violence – particularly in the form of sexist and misogynistic remarks, humiliating images, mobbing, intimidation and threats – is perpetrated against women parliamentarians.”
In the new US Congress a total of 150 senators and representatives are women. That’s only one more than the 149 seated at the beginning of the previous Congress, but it represents a 44% increase from a decade ago. At the beginning of the 114th Congress of 2015-17, 104 voting members were women, data from US-based Pew Research Centre shows:
- This year’s total is still slightly below the record number of women ever to serve in Congress at once, which is 152, set following a series of special elections in 2024.
- All told, women make up a smaller share of the federal legislature than of the overall U.S. population ages 25 and older (28% vs. 51%).
“At the beginning of the current Congress, there were 125 women in the House (29% of all representatives) and 25 in the Senate (25% of all senators). Women make up the same share of each chamber as they did at the start of the last Congress, although their number dropped by one in the House. There were 124 women representatives and 25 women senators at the beginning of the 118th Congress.”
The Pew says most incumbent women lawmakers who sought re-election in 2024 – 104 of 110 representatives and all nine senators – kept their seats.
Democratic women far outnumber GOP women in Congress, the Pew data shows.
The new Congress opened with 110 Democratic women and 40 Republican women across both chambers. Women make up 42% of congressional Democrats and 15% of congressional Republicans, very similar to where things stood at the start of the last Congress.
Looking at each chamber individually, women now account for:
- 44% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans in the House
- 34% of Democrats and 17% of Republicans in the Senate
The European Parliament says it stands for gender equality. However, the EU elections in June did not improve the Parliament’s gender equality but made it slightly worse.
The share of women elected as MEPs at the European elections in June 2024 was 38.5%, down from 39.8% just before the elections, the Parliament’s data shows.
The percentage of female MEPs has increased compared to the early days of European integration. Only 31 women were members from 1952 until the first elections in 1979. In the first directly-elected European Parliament representation of women stood at 15.9%
The Parliament stresses that, despite the negative outcome of the latest elections, as far as the representation of women in the European Parliament goes, it is above the world average for national parliaments and also above the EU average for national parliaments.
Since January 2022, the Parliament is being presided over by a woman: Maltese MEP Roberta Metsola who now has been re-elected for another two and a half years.
In the 2024-2029 parliamentary term, seven of the 14 vice-presidents are women, more than in the previous term when there were six.
In 2019, two EU institutions broke the glass ceiling and got its first ever female president: Ursula von der Leyen became President of the European Commission and Christine Lagarde became President of the European Central Bank.
von der Leyen has been re-elected for a second five-year term as Commission President.
Former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas is new EU high representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy.
UN Women global data shows that 113 countries have never had a woman at the helm, and only 26 countries are led by a woman today.
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