Legislating at the Intersections: Race, Gender, and Representation

Record numbers of women, and in particular women of color, are gaining elective office across the country. This article explores how their presence in legislative bodies might make a difference in policy agendas and legislative advocacy, especially at the intersections of race and gender. Leveraging original datasets of Democratic lawmakers and the bills they sponsor in fifteen U.S. state houses in 1997 and 2005, we examine multiple forms of race-gender policy leadership and how it is tied to legislators' race-gender identity. Testing theories of intersectional representation, we find that women of color often are the most likely race-gender policy leaders. Indeed, our measures of race-gender policy leadership reveal the distinctive representational work of women of color, which traditional, single-axis measures of legislative activity on behalf of women or racial/ethnic minorities cannot.