President-elect Joe Biden announced his remaining Cabinet nominees this week, fulfilling his promise to build the most diverse Cabinet in American history.
But the United States still lags much of the world, particularly in women’s representation. What’s more, Biden’s appointments come after President Trump appointed fewer women to his Cabinet than any of his previous three predecessors.
Here’s what you need to know about cabinet diversity here and abroad.
How we did our research
Our book “Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender” examined cabinets in seven presidential and parliamentary democracies, beginning when each country first appointed a female minister up until 2016. In studying Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, we chose countries with different political systems, rules for cabinet appointments, and proportions of women in parliament.
Our data includes all ministers appointed in a government’s first cabinet after winning an election. Our account of each country’s rules and norms for appointments come from interviews, government documents, media reports and memoirs.
Introducing the “concrete floor”
In all seven countries, we found that as soon as women’s inclusion in a cabinet goes beyond a single female minister, some minimum threshold becomes informally established. For instance, German cabinets started including women in 1961, and since 1998, governments have included between four and six women out of cabinets ranging from 13 to 16 ministers. Once a norm becomes established, leaders of any party that wins appoint women at or near that threshold. We called this the “concrete floor,” because concrete is a firm foundation on which to build.
Once concrete sets, it’s hard to break. Leaders are uniformly praised for appointing women to their cabinets. We find no evidence that men who appoint more women are criticized for doing so; rather, they’re applauded for being modern and inclusive. In fact, such leaders occasionally boast of their numbers of women. In contrast, opponents criticize leaders who appoint fewer women; sometimes members of their own party do so as well.
Some presidents raise the floor by nominating more women than the minimum. Doing this puts pressure on their successors, even when they lead more conservative parties. In Spain, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s two parity cabinets were followed by a conservative prime minister whose two cabinets included 31 and 39 percent women ministers respectively, a higher proportion than any previous conservative government.
Women’s inclusion in U.S. Cabinets
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor, making her the first female Cabinet member. But as you can see in the figure below, not until President Ronald Reagan’s second term did every president include at least one woman in his initial Cabinets. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed three women to his initial Cabinet, including Janet Reno as the first female attorney general.
Thereafter, every president — until Donald Trump — included at least three women in his Cabinet. As the U.S. Cabinet has grown to 15 department secretaries, the number of women has held steady, setting the concrete floor for women’s Cabinet inclusion at three, or 20 percent.
Compared to the other countries we examined, the concrete floor in U.S. Cabinets has remained low. Women’s inclusion has grown more dramatically in all the other countries we studied, except for Australia. In the past two decades, Canada, Chile and Spain have all had gender-parity cabinets and in Germany, women have made up more than 30 percent of ministers in five of the last six governments.
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A Cabinet that looks more like America and breaks at least one glass ceiling
Biden has nominated women to five of 15 Cabinet posts, exceeding by one the records set by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Both presidents included four women in their initial second-term Cabinets, as did Barack Obama in his first.
Biden’s nominations are historic in other ways too. Biden promised that his administration, “both in the White House and … in the Cabinet, [would] look like the country.” Even without gender parity, Biden’s Cabinet will set records in diversity, smashing at least two glass ceilings.
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- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘Biden intends to nominate Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) for secretary of the interior; if confirmed she would be the country’s first Native American Cabinet member.’, ‘_id’: ‘X2DM6FYO55DYFMWW77XRJ6EH4M’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: []}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘Biden has nominated Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio) to lead housing and urban development, Michigan’s former governor Jennifer Granholm to lead the department of energy, and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo as secretary of commerce. In nominating five women, Biden is repairing the concrete floor damaged by Trump.’, ‘_id’: ‘DD7ICIPVRJCJTISVSDPMZJL3RM’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: [{‘pos’: 107, ‘comment’: ‘Democratic ‘}]}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
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Cabinets, norms, and democratic legitimacy
Democratic Party elites and activists have applauded Biden for choosing Kamala D. Harris as his running mate, and for promising a diverse governing team. Our research shows that public praise, and the visibility of African American, Latinx, Native American and women’s faces in the U.S. executive branch can establish new norms of inclusion that constrain future presidents, making it harder to dip too far below the newly raised concrete floor.
Few formal rules constrain leaders when selecting ministers. Although the U.S. president’s choices are subject to Senate confirmation, historically, most nominees are in fact confirmed. Although formal rules are scarce, we identified a host of informal norms that constrain presidents and prime ministers as they select ministers.
The most powerful and routinely observed norms are about who must be represented in the government. Members of politically important demographic groups generally must be represented. For instance, in countries like Canada and Germany, leaders must ensure that key regions are represented in their cabinets, or face backlash. In the United States, all-white Cabinets are informally prohibited; African Americans have been represented in every Cabinet since 1975.
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Those norms about cabinet diversity shift over time, usually because historically marginalized groups mobilize politically. When leaders violate inclusionary norms or when concrete floors are cracked, subsequent leaders typically undertake fairly speedy repairs.
Trump broke norms by appointing just two women in his initial Cabinet; none remain at the end of his term. President-elect Biden’s prospective nomination of five women has already repaired the concrete floor that Trump cracked. He’s missed the mark on gender parity, however, leaving that milestone for a future president.
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Karen Beckwith is the Flora Stone Mather Professor in the department of political science at Case Western Reserve University.
Susan Franceschet (@sufranceschet) is professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
Together with Claire Annesley, they published “Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender” (Oxford University Press, 2019).
