9
campaign support by women’s PACs. Examples of feminist legislation sponsored and
cosponsored in the 103
rd
and 104
th
Congresses include bills concerning family and
medical leave, child support enforcement, reproductive rights and other women’s health
issues, sexual harassment, domestic violence, gender equity in education, and affirmative
action programs for women-owned businesses.
The social welfare bills include both liberal and conservative proposals
concerning issues with which women have historically been concerned in their role as
caregiver, such as health care, education, and poverty assistance. These issues are often
identified in the literature as underlying causes of the gender gap (Kaufmann and
Petrocick 1999, Norrander 1999). Similarly studies of stereotypes voters hold concerning
the issue competence of men and women candidates often identify these issues as areas of
female candidate expertise (Huddy and Terkildsen 1993, Dolan 2004). Examples of
social welfare bills sponsored during the 103
rd
and 104
th
Congresses include proposals to
expand health insurance coverage, reform Medicare, expand coverage of mental health
services, increase funding for school lunches, create school choice voucher programs,
establish regulations for foster care or adoption, punish crimes against children and the
elderly, and reform welfare.
To determine whether sex differences in agenda-setting behavior are greater for
legislative activities that require more extensive expenditures of time and resources to
achieve a particular level of re-election or policy benefit, I compare the magnitude of the
sex differences in the proportion of legislators’ bill sponsorship activities devoted to
women’s issues to the sex differences in the proportion of legislator’s cosponsorship
activity dedicated to women’s issues (Hypothesis 2). Thus, the dependent variable is the
number of the women’s issue bills that a member cosponsored divided by the total
Convention