This piece looks at how women business owners remain underrepresented in congressional tax hearings and shows, using data and large language models, that more diverse witness panels meaningfully expand the information Congress receives when writing tax laws.

Key takeaways:

1. The authors’ new Congressional Record Representation Dataset (CRRDx) shows that less than about one-quarter of witnesses at tax-related hearings from the 110th–119th Congresses were women, and nearly 40 percent of hearings were all-male “manels,” even as women-owned firms now account for roughly 39 percent of U.S. businesses and have grown faster than men-owned firms.

2. By embedding and analyzing more than 1,300 witness opening statements and 2,700 statements for the record with an LLM, the authors find that increasing the share of women and the occupational diversity on panels significantly increases “information diversity,” with the most diverse hearings occurring when about 42 percent of witnesses are women, well above current practice.

3. The paper argues that statements for the record are an important, underappreciated channel for diverse voices—especially women and other marginalized groups—to influence the legislative process and recommends that Congress track and publish witness demographics, modernize public-comment tools, and more intentionally diversify witness panels in high-stakes tax policy debates.

Read the publication.