New blog post from Act on Mass volunteer and endorsement committee member, Noah Risley.
It would be a truism to say that the Massachusetts General Court is an “Old Boys Club” of mostly White men. But what does that mean? Does the demographic makeup of our legislature actually matter?
Unsurprisingly, yes.
My name is Noah Risley, I’m a volunteer researcher for Act On Mass, and I’ll be taking us on a deep dive looking at the demographics of the past two sessions of the state legislature, the 194th and 193rd General Courts, and how our unrepresentative legislature exacerbates the issues of transparency and corruption on Beacon Hill.
Most commentary about legislative demographics are reserved for the U.S. Congress. When state legislatures do get put under a microscope, almost all analysis is conducted in the aggregate and ignores the real meat of policymaking: committees and leadership.
Dashboards from advocacy groups like Vote Run Lead show how underrepresented women, especially women of color, are in the Massachusetts General Court. The National Conference of State Legislatures only has data on our legislature from 2015 and 2020 (with a decent amount of information missing).
The most detailed reporting obviously comes from local outlets, like this piece from the Globe highlighting recent gains made by lawmakers of color. Yet, even local reporting takes a wide focus on chamber-wide analysis (e.g. “The Legislature is 83 percent white”… “Of the state’s 198 sitting lawmakers, just five are Black women”), missing a deeper picture.
And so, if you wanted to look at the demographic makeup of a specific committee or study it across sessions, you’d need to collect and analyze almost all of the data yourself. So, with help from Drew Bowler of Beacon Hill Compliance Tracker fame and AOM’s fearless leader, Scotia Hille, I did.
Before we go any further, let’s get a baseline on the Bay State as a whole. Here’s the approximate demographic (race/ethnicity × sex) picture of Massachusetts at the 2020 census:
| Massachusetts Population by Race/Ethnicity and Sex | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Race / Ethnicity | % Male | % Female | Total % of MA Pop. |
| White | 32.73% | 34.82% | 67.55% |
| Hispanic or Latino (any race) | 6.11% | 6.51% | 12.63% |
| Asian | 3.43% | 3.76% | 7.18% |
| Black or African-American | 3.13% | 3.37% | 6.50% |
| Two or More Races | 2.26% | 2.41% | 4.67% |
| Some Other Race | 0.65% | 0.66% | 1.31% |
| American Indian/Alaska Native | 0.07% | 0.07% | 0.13% |
| Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander | 0.01% | 0.01% | 0.02% |
| Total | 48.39% | 51.61% | 100.00% |
Some remarkable figures to mention before delving deeper:
- Despite making up only 34.82% of the state population, White men made up 60% of the previous 193rd General Court (GC) and make up 61% of the current state legislature.
- Women of all races make up only 31% of the current state legislature, despite being a majority of the state’s population
- Women of color made up 16.79% of Massachusetts’ population in 2020, but as of 2026 are only 7.53% of the state legislature. That is actually a full percentage point increase, as in the 193rd GC women of color held only 6.43% of seats
- There are no current lawmakers of American Indian, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander descent.
Leadership, Chairs and Vice Chairs
In a legislature as hierarchical as ours, where influence is concentrated among a few individuals at the top, what matters most is power and who has access to it. To see that, we’ll look at the leadership teams of both chambers, committee chairs, and vice chairs.
Leadership across both chambers features prominent female lawmakers at a rate roughly proportional to the amount of women in the legislature (30%), although disproportionate to the state’s demographics. However, there is a stark difference when it comes to racial diversity. Currently, Speaker Mariano’s hand-picked leadership team (which you can view for yourself here) features two Representatives who are not white: Frank Moran and Carlos González (20%). President Spilka’s team has none.
To the Speaker’s (almost) credit, he doubled the amount of non-White membership on his leadership team from one to two when he replaced outgoing Third Division Chair Ruth Balser with Carlos González. President Spilka’s team, on the other hand, was also entirely White during the prior session.
Surely, some of you must be thinking, the situation must improve when looking at the roles of Chairs and Vice-Chairs. And it does! Kind of…
Currently, White lawmakers hold 67 of a total 76 committee chairships, or 88%, and 59 out of 73 vice-chairships, or 81%.
The 194th GC is still a modest improvement in regards to the 193rd, though. Last session, White males held 46 Vice Chair roles, and this session they hold 40. That’s a drop from 63.8% to 54.8%, a noticeable decrease. This session there are four Latina Vice Chairs, compared to zero in the 193rd GC. Asian women went from chairing 0 committees last session to now chairing two, Climate Action and Sustainability in the House and Emergency Preparedness and Management in the Senate.
However, Asian lawmakers are the least represented in leadership positions relative to their share of the total Massachusetts population. And in total, Asian lawmakers hold just 3 chairmanships and one vice chairmanship, deeply disproportionate to their 7% of the state’s population.
And so, the fact remains that leadership power is incredibly concentrated in the hands of White, mostly male lawmakers.
Committees and Procedural Control
Not all committees are created equal. Ways and Means is the only committee where the chair is included as part of formal leadership, for example. The committee assembled to deal with the massive amount of proposed ballot questions this year made headlines for clashing with advocates. Committee assignments aren’t created equal, either.
A 2021 study of state legislatures documents a persistent national trend: women legislators are disproportionately steered toward “caring” policy committees, namely those dealing with health, education, and children/families.
The makeup of committees in Massachusetts mirrors this trend. The only committees where female lawmakers reach or exceed gender parity in our legislature are these “caring” committees. Meanwhile, committees focused on fiscal and technological issues are even more dominated by male members than the rest of the legislature.
The same study also found that more experienced members tended to group into fiscal and procedural committees, and this is largely the case in Massachusetts. With the exception of Ways and Means, there are almost no lawmakers of color on the committees which act as procedural gatekeepers and decide the final fate of most bills.
The committees on Rules, Steering & Policy, and Bills in the Third Reading all have immense procedural power, but only four lawmakers of color sit on any of those three committees: Donald Wong, Frank Moran, and Carlos González, who all sit on the House Rules Committee, and Senator Pavel Payano, who sits on the Senate Steering and Policy Committee.
Tenure, more than any other single factor, determines who controls the flow of legislation on Beacon Hill. Only five lawmakers of color — Wong, Moran, and González along with Russell Holmes and Tackey Chan — have served longer than 10 years. Massachusetts’ historical lack of representation in the legislature combined with the tendency of tenured members to favor procedural committees means these committees are even more dominated by White lawmakers than normal. It also means legislative tenure can serve as a proxy for Whiteness.
Ways and Means is a notable and surprising exception. Despite being an incredibly important procedural committee, it is 37% women and 29% people of color, making it one of the most diverse committees in the entire General Court. But Ways and Means is also the legislature’s largest committee by a wide margin, and the previously mentioned committees come after Ways and Means in the legislative process, meaning they act as a bottleneck to this small bright spot for representation.
Why Does It Matter?
There are limits to this kind of representation-based analysis. For example, Senator Sal DiDomenico, a White senator, represents the same area of Chelsea as Representative Judith García (the House’s first Honduran-American member). He received praise from Gladys Vega of La Colaborativa for representing the community well after redistricting: “He’s like a brother to me… You also have to have leaders who get it. That’s what we’ve got.”
A 2012 study in the American Journal of Political Science tested how race, ethnicity, and gender combine to shape policymaking, using welfare reform proposals as its test case. It found that women of color specifically—more than women in general, or men of color—had the strongest, most consistent moderating effect on punitive welfare reform proposals. A related study done in 2020 found this pattern consistent across multiple policy areas. This means that looking at a single axis of diversity can hide deeper revelations, and that an intersectional lens is necessary to get the full picture on policymaking.
This piece is meant to open the door to further conversations about gender, race, intersectionality, and other issues of representation in the legislature. It is not meant to flatten and reduce the complex, important issues facing Massachusetts’ communities of color into a single solution of legislative representation.
What’s Next?
The prior data and analysis was only possible after months of independent data collection and with the help of other government transparency-focused activists. It shouldn’t have been as difficult as it was.
In the coming weeks, Act On Mass will be launching a first-of-its-kind tool where YOU, fellow researchers, journalists, academics, and curious citizens, will be able to see granular, committee-level data, district information, compare information across sessions, and start conducting your own independent analysis on our legislature.
Popular government without popular information is but a farce.