Women make up 28% of voting members in the 119th Congress – on par with their share in the last Congress, but a considerable increase from where things stood even 10 years ago.
As of the new Congress’ first day in session, a total of 150 senators and representatives were 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.
- 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%).
Note: This analysis reflects the 533 voting members of the 119th Congress seated as of Jan. 3, 2025. It excludes members seated later, notably Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, a Republican appointee sworn in on Jan. 21.
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.
Most incumbent women lawmakers who sought reelection in 2024 – 104 of 110 representatives and all nine senators – kept their seats. The returning members include the longest-serving woman in congressional history: Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, now in her 42nd year in the House since arriving in 1983.
(For the purpose of this analysis, we are counting special election winners who stood for their first regular general election in 2024 as new to Congress, not reelected incumbents. There were three such women who ran to keep their House seats in 2024; all three were successful.)
Two dozen women lawmakers are new to Congress
On the first day of the 119th Congress, three women senators and 21 women representatives were newly seated, including three current members who were selected via special elections in 2023 or 2024. All three senators and 18 representatives are Democrats; three representatives are Republicans.
Some of these members represent notable firsts:
- Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester is the first woman and first Black person to represent Delaware in the Senate. She and newly elected Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland are the first two Black women to serve in the Senate at the same time.
- Republican Rep. Julie Fedorchak is the first woman to represent North Dakota in the House.
- Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware is the first transgender member of Congress.
Sixteen states have never elected a woman to the Senate, and just one – Mississippi – has never had a woman representative in the House. But as of 2022, all 50 states have sent at least one woman to either the Senate or the House.
Democratic women far outnumber GOP women in Congress
The 119th 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
Women’s share of Congress hasn’t always tilted so Democratic. Until the Great Depression, most of the dozen women who had been elected to the House were Republicans. And for several decades afterward, women’s representation in that chamber was fairly evenly divided between the parties. But the gap widened in the 1970s and has persisted, despite a temporary narrowing during the 1980s.
By the early 1990s, the vast majority of women in Congress belonged to the Democratic Party. And since 1992 – known as the “Year of the Woman” following record gains for women’s representation in Congress – 68% of women in the House have been Democrats, as have 67% of women in the Senate. (This count includes one independent senator who caucused with Democrats: former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.)
The history of women in Congress
Women have been in Congress for more than a century. Montana Republican Jeannette Rankin was the first, elected to a newly created House seat in 1916, two years after her state gave women the right to vote. In 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting voting rights to women across the nation. That year, Alice Mary Robertson of Oklahoma became the first woman to defeat an incumbent congressman.
The first woman in the Senate was Rebecca Latimer Felton in 1922. The Georgia Democrat and suffragist was sworn in to a vacant seat when the 67th Congress was unexpectedly called back into session; her appointment was largely symbolic, and she served for just a day.
Women only began serving in more substantial numbers in the past few decades. As of Jan. 3, 2025, more than three-quarters of the women ever to serve in the House (300 of 396) or the Senate (48 of 63) were elected or appointed in 1992 or later.
‘Widow’s succession’ in Congress
Well into the 1970s, one of the most common ways for a woman to enter Congress was by succeeding her deceased husband or father, either by election or appointment. Of the 90 women who served in the House between 1916 and 1980, 34 were elected to their husband’s seat or, if he died before Election Day, named as his replacement on the ballot.
Though “widow’s succession” is far less common in the 21st century, it’s happened once in the Senate and twice in the House since 2000.
Two current members of the House succeeded their late spouses: Democrat Doris Matsui of California, who has held office since 2005, and Republican Julia Ludlow of Louisiana, who’s held office since 2021.
