This dissertation asks why women remain less politically engaged than their male counterparts, despite important strides taken toward gender equity in politics, the workplace, and the home. Although one prominent answer to this puzzle has been that women are underrepresented in politics, the research thus far has failed to show consistent differences between women who are represented by women (termed dyadic descriptive representation) and women who are not. I propose that these inconsistent results are borne out of an underdeveloped model of gender and representation. It may be the case that women are not responding as we would predict because conceptualizing engagement as a micro process overlooks the larger social and political factors at work. Put simply, I argue that the micro process of dyadic descriptive representation does little to alter macro level perceptions among female constituents about our institutions of government as gendered and discriminatory. And I propose that it is these macro perceptions that create the different ‘tastes’ that have been said to cause the gender gap in engagement (Verba, Burns, and Schlozman 1997).
I test this theory using an original, nationally representative survey of 1,000 respondents. The first component of this survey is a broad range of questions about political engagement, unfair practices within the policy process, and the substantive nature of congressional policy outputs. These survey questions not only confirm that women think about Congress as gendered and discriminatory, but they also shed light on the gender gap in engagement that has remained stagnant, and unexplainable, for so long. The second component of this survey is an embedded experiment designed to test what impact the underrepresentation of women in politics has on perceptions of political legitimacy and levels of political engagement. I find strong evidence to suggest that a dyadic match between constituent and representative is largely inconsequential without a simultaneous increase in collective representation within Congress as a whole. Combined, these results point to the importance of conceptualizing gender and representation through a macro lens.