“Girl Bosses and Government Insiders: Who Had Access to the Biden Administration Gender Policy Council (GPC)?”

Ever since President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, Democratic presidents have frequently created White House offices focused on women, including the Gender Policy Council (Biden), the White House Council on Women and Girls (Obama), and the Office for Women’s Initiatives and Outreach (Clinton). Though these offices are often responses to women’s movements calls for a cabinet-level department on gender issues that could promote gendered policymaking throughout the government, scholars have yet to examine how effectively these White House offices represent women even though they could serve as a model for a department of gender issues. This paper begins to answer those questions by examining which individuals and organized interests had access to the Biden-era Gender Policy Council. Relying on data compiled from White House and interest group press releases, newspaper articles, and White House event read out reports, it identifies 1,679 individuals and organized interests who participated in events with GPC staffers between 2021 and 2024. To determine who had the most access to the GPC, it tests the hypotheses that GPC staffers were more likely to meet with organizations rather than individuals, women’s organizations rather than any other type of organized interest, organizations that had a political fundraising arm, organizations and individuals that donated to the Biden campaign and/or Democrats, and organizations that were located in Washington, DC.