Is lobbying no longer an old boys’ club?
Movies and TV portray lobbyists often as a bunch of cigar smoking men cutting back room deals. As with much in politics, there is an implicit gender imbalance at work (even though perhaps the most famous movie lobbyist was played by Annette Benning in The American President).
Is that true? Is this a part of the policy process where women are at a numerical disadvantage?
While we cannot know how much influence men have vs women in aggregate, we do know how many are registered as lobbyists. Using lobbying disclosure forms in Massachusetts, and data from the Social Security Administration, we estimated the gender of those in the lobbying process from 2025, 2015, and 2005. (Now, before we begin, a caveat: these are gender estimates based on historical naming patterns, so it may have gotten a Pat or a Chris wrong, and it doesn’t account for anyone non-binary. But since we’re looking at thousands of names and seeking rough proportions, it should suffice for our purposes.)
We broke this population into three segments, as they’re described in the lobbying database:
Lobbyist entities: They are people who work independently or at government affairs-focused firms. They’re what we often think of as lobbyists, taking on clients and advocating for their interests.
Non-entity lobbyists: These are people who work for the organization they lobby for, like the policy director at a union or utility.
Authorizing officers: These are the people on the client side who sign the disclosure forms and are, presumably, directing the lobbying work. They are not lobbyists, but involved in the process.
What we found was below (and if you want to see all the lobbyists for 2025 in a single spreadsheet, that’s also at the button below).
In all areas, gender balance has increased in the last 20 years, with this year seeing in-house lobbyists basically equal, at 50.1% male. Since there are about six times as many non-entity lobbyists as entity lobbyist, this means that the overall pool of those advocating in the State House is closer to gender equal.
Authorizing officers have seen the largest drop over the last 20 years, but are still predominantly male.
Those listed as lobbyist entities are heavily male. This does not mean that contract lobbying firms are as male as this suggests. It could be that there are people who have worked on these accounts outside of meetings but were not listed on the disclosure forms. But it does suggest that there is still a gender imbalance.
What this means, what its implications are for policy, and what steps are needed (if any), I’ll leave for others to decide.
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