Gender, Representation, and the Complexity of Lawmaking

Women legislators navigate distinct representational pressures in both Congress and the states, balancing expectations to represent women’s interests with the need to demonstrate legislative productivity in male-dominated institutions. This paper examines how gender shapes the complexity of the bills legislators sponsor, highlighting how gendered expectations interact with tenure, institutional context, and chamber composition. Using bill text and metadata from the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, combined with gender composition data, I analyze how bill complexity varies by legislator gender, career background, and career stage, including tenure and seniority within the chamber. Multilevel models with random effects for legislators, sessions, and chambers allow for the estimation of gendered patterns across time and institutional settings. I hypothesize that women in male-dominated legislatures sponsor bills with lower complexity early in their careers, reflecting pressure to produce accessible legislation, but that this gap narrows or reverses as tenure and female representation increase. I further assess whether women with prior professional or policy experience, such as legal, administrative, or advocacy backgrounds, leverage that expertise to introduce more technically complex legislation, or whether institutional learning over time substitutes for pre-legislative experience. Finally, I test whether women employ greater strategic complexity, such as broader cosponsorship networks or multifaceted bill structures, to secure support in environments where they face higher barriers to passage. This analysis provides a new understanding of how gendered dynamics, experience, and institutional position shape legislative behavior, demonstrating that bill complexity is both a signal of expertise and a tool of representation.