How Framing Gender Diversity in Government Affects Perceptions of Substantive Representation

How does elite rhetoric emphasizing women’s presence in government affect perceptions that government substantively represents women? Building on past work on women’s representation and framing effects, this article tests how subtle changes in political communications spotlighting a group’s presence in government signal that government has prioritized the group’s welfare. We first draw on original panel data on federal employee gender between 1973 and 2020, showing that women remain underrepresented in the bureaucracy despite efforts by presidents to trumpet recent gains. In preregistered and replicated experiments, we show presenting statistics on federal agencies’ gender compositions in terms of women’s job shares (e.g., 20% of an agency’s jobs are “held by women”) rather than logically equivalent information emphasizing men (e.g., 80% “held by men”) increases beliefs that government represents women’s interests. Elites can impart the impression of substantive representation by arbitrarily altering rhetoric concerning descriptive representation.