Women make up just 17% of the 535 seats in Congress. Far less, of course, than their share of the population. There are 73 women in the House;56 Democrats and 17 Republicans, and 17 in the Senate;13 Democrats and 4 Republicans. That adds up to just 90 seats occupied by women.
I've always thought that there's way too much testosterone in Congress, and listening this morning to NPR's Morning Edition, I heard a piece on the psychology of negotiating that confirmed my belief.
I had a chat with Vladas Griskevicius who was a psychologist at University of Minnesota, and here's what he had to say.
..We often think that the people who sit around the table, all they're bringing to the table are their political views, their ideologies, their party loyalties and so on. But they're also guys. I mean literally the people who sit around a lot of these negotiating tables are guys. The sex ratio of the people in a given place plays a huge role in how those people behave and how they negotiate with one another.
Griskevicius finds in experiments that when men are surrounded by other men, their behavior changes without their awareness.
In experiments when men feel there are lots of other men around, they tend to pose more, they tend to talk tough, they become shortsighted, they take bigger bets.
It seems to me that if there were more women in Congress, negotiations would look far different. The psychology seems to bear that out. Please don't take this as male bashing. It's not. I think that Tea Party members tend to be more paternalistic then the general population of males, and their behavior in the debt ceiling negotiations has caused a great deal of problems for all of us. Nonetheless, IMO more women in Congress could mitigate the chest beating and posturing for dominance. That would be good for all of us.
You can see here how few women have served in congress since 1917.