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Why Republican Governance Sucks, Part 8: Vote Democratic for Women's Rights [1]
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Date: 2025-02-16
Previously, I wrote about maternal and infant mortality maternal and infant mortality as a measure of women’s health and the wide differences between states on these two measures. Just as we looked at a broad, composite measure of labor rights in the last entry in this series, let’s widen our perspective and look at a composite measure of women’s equality state-by-state.
There are actual several such composite measures available that have been put together by different sources, using different components and weighting methods. Here I’m going to use a measure published by Georgetown University in 2020 that combined three dimensions with 4 measures or indicators in each: Justice (maternal mortality, reproductive healthcare access, legal protections and discriminatory norms); Security (partner violence, gun deaths, healthcare affordability, and community safety); and Inclusion (employment, working poor representation in the legislature, and college degrees). This was the broadest composite measure of women’s equality that I came across, and it merges a number of indicators I’ve already discussed separately: educational achievement, unemployment, and gun deaths, in addition to maternal mortality. You can read more about the methodology in the source article.
So what do the 2020 rankings show?
Top 10 states for gender equality, 2020
Massachusetts .709 Connecticut .696 Vermont .691 Rhode Island .679 New Hampshire .652 Maryland .639 New York .634 Maine .632 Hawaii .626 New Jersey .607
10 blue states. Next:
Bottom 10 states for gender equality, 2020
Louisiana .167 Mississippi .182 Arkansas .231 Alabama .238 Kentucky .277 West Virginia .294 Tennessee .299 South Carolina .304 Wyoming .308 Oklahoma .339
10 red states. Well, if you’ve been reading this series you probably already predicted that.
With so many indicators in the composite measure, a huge range of state policies determine where the individual states fall on a scale such as this. Minimum wage, affordable access to education, regulation of gun access (such as red flag laws covering domestic abusers), access to reproductive health care including abortion, and much more all contribute to these outcomes. As we’ve already seen, blue states consistently outperform red states on all these measures.
Our slogan for today: Vote Democratic for women’s equality!
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