Women have made significant gains in Congress in recent elections, but that progress has stalled for the first time since 2016, falling short of the current record levels.
The latest woman to lose her race is Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, with NBC News projecting her defeat to Republican Nick Begich in Alaska. One other female lawmaker, GOP Rep. Michelle Steel, is locked in a tight and uncalled race in Southern California, where she is currently trailing Democrat Derek Tran by a narrow margin.
If Steel also loses, the number of women in the next Congress, including both the House and the Senate, will reach 150 (including the eventual winner of Iowa’s 1st District recount between GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Christina Bohannon). That means the next Congress could begin one fewer woman than the 151 who were in Congress on Election Day, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics— the first decline since 2010 and only the second since 1978.
If Steel wins, that number would be 151, the same number of women serving in Congress on Election Day, and the first stall in progress since 2016, when President-elect Donald Trump won his first term.
In both elections, Trump defeated primary and general election opponents seeking to become the first female president. After his first election, women made significant gains in Congress in the 2018 and 2020 elections, but that progress slowed in 2022 in part because House races were shaken up by redistricting, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics.
Both scenarios mean the number of women in the next Congress will also fall short of the current record of 152 women, following Texas Democratic Rep. Erica Lee Carter’s special election win this month.
“Progress for women in politics is not inevitable,” Dittmar said. Despite the gains of 2018 and 2020, women are still outnumbered in Congress, making up 28% of lawmakers while comprising half the population.
“We are already at a place where women are underrepresented, and so any decline in the pace of change means that it’s going to take that much longer to get to even parity, right, which is just that base level of representation that would live up to our supposed promise of a representative democracy,” Dittmar said.
“Any decline is a setback on that path to parity,” she added.
Democratic women are on track to match their current record of 94 women in the House. The Senate will include 16 Democratic women, also matching the current record, including two Black women serving together for the first time: Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks and Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester, who both won races for open seats. Senate Republican women will also meet their current record, with nine in the chamber.
The number of House Republican women will decrease because of some losses and retirements, falling from 34 in the current Congress to 31 or 32, depending on Steel and Miller-Meeks’ races. Republican women are adding two new members to their House ranks, with North Dakota Republican Julie Fedorchak and South Carolina Republican Sheri Biggs winning two deep-red open seats.
Despite that slight decline, Republican women have made significant gains in the House since reaching a low point after the 2018 midterms, when there were just 13 female Republicans in the chamber. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., has helped lead the effort to boost their ranks through her group E-PAC, and described that work in a September interview as a resounding success. Stefanik has been nominated to be Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and could leave Congress next year if she is confirmed.
“We are thrilled with the progress Republican women have made since we got into this fight in 2018, but there is always more work to be done,” Danielle Barrow, executive director of Winning For Women Action Fund, a super PAC focused on electing GOP women. She noted that there were fewer competitive House races this year, and an overall decline in the number of male and female candidates stepping forward to run.
“That makes our work to recruit and support high quality women candidates in primaries all the more important,” she added. “Our entities are proud to have raised over $13 million this cycle to support Republican women, and WFW Action Fund is doubling down on our efforts as we head into next year.”
Dittmar noted that Republican women have not had the same institutional support as Democratic women, who for decades have had help from groups like Emily’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights.
“As we look to the future, Emily’s List knows that now is not the time to rest, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and continue fighting for more representation up and down the ballot,” Sara Spain, a spokesperson for the organization, said in a statement Thursday.
And while organizations such as Winning for Women and View PAC are working to close the gap on the Republican side, Dittmar said they need more support.
“Especially in a moment like this, it takes a reality check to say, ‘No, there’s not enough being done if we want to see that continued gain,’” she said. “And these organizations are doing, I think, important work, but they need additional help. They need additional funds. They need additional capacity, and they need the party and the party leaders themselves to support the type of work that they’re doing, so that they can see gains across the board.”
The stalled progress for women in Congress is also in part because both parties’ pickups were largely won by men.
In the House, just two of the Democrats’ seven flips were in districts with female candidates: Oregon’s Janelle Bynum (who defeated a Republican woman) and New York’s Laura Gillen. None of the House Republicans’ seven flips were by female candidates.
In the Senate, the three GOP Senate pickups in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana that sealed the Republican majority were also won by male candidates.
After Trump’s first election in 2016, Democrats did see a surge in women running for Congress in 2018, and a wave of Republican women stepped up to run two years later in 2020. It’s too early to know whether the 2026 midterms will see similar increases from women of either party.
“We’ve seen before, at least, that women were motivated to step up when they felt that sense of threat and the perception that like it has to be now, because we can’t wait,” Dittmar said.
