Politics of Parenthood: Challenges and Best Practices for Studying Parenthood in Quantitative Research

In 2018, Vote Mama Foundation first asked how many moms of young children are serving in office across the United States? Very quickly, it was discovered that this data did not exist, and if it did, it was not publicly available. Since then, Vote Mama Foundation has founded the Politics of Parenthood data series, which is a comprehensive dataset examining the parenthood status among all 541 US members of Congress and over 2000 women state legislators across the United States. We have found that mothers of young children represent less than 10% of the 119th Congress and of state legislature positions across the US. Despite the severe underrepresentation of moms, our data shows that the number of moms of young children has increased in recent years, despite stagnating levels of women’s representation overall. This paper examines the findings of Vote Mama Foundation across all four iterations of our Politics of Parenthood dataset, and contextualizes the data within the existing literature on the relationship between motherhood, representation, and holding elected office. We also present our data collection protocol to illuminate challenges in studying parenthood status quantitatively. We identify key areas for future research on motherhood as a political identity as well as offer suggestions for developing measurement tools for scholars who use measures of parenthood status in their work.