by Erika Lovely, Politico

“If it’s Sunday, it’s more men wearing dark suits.”

So far, none of the five major Sunday morning television news shows has embraced that as a promotional slogan. But women’s advocates — armed with new data showing that the shows are a bastion of male power — say it would be an apt description for the lot of them.

Even as women have vaulted to be House speaker and hold a host of other influential positions on Capitol Hill, female lawmakers continue to be under-represented as guests on the Sunday shows.

According to research by American University’s Women & Politics Institute, female lawmakers have composed 13.5 percent of the total Sunday show appearances by all representatives and senators this year.

The suggestion that the Sunday shows are less hospitable to women has prompted a debate over who’s to blame among network producers, Capitol Hill political operatives and women’s advocates.

Some academic researchers and press secretaries for women in Congress say the network bookers have a men-in-suits mind-set that leads to familiar faces appearing over and over — and vital women’s voices being muffled on Sunday shows that historically are an important platform of Washington power.

The shows’ producers bridle at the criticism, saying that, despite their strong interest in booking more women, the shows must be topical and reflect the reality that men still hold more of the most influential and newsmaking positions in Congress.

And they say some congressional women — Nancy Pelosi chief among them — do not help the cause by making themselves so difficult to book. Most producers say they try to recruit female lawmakers nearly every weekend but receive a steady stream of rejection slips.

“I’ve probably asked her 25 times. She is just unwilling to do it,” Betsy Fischer, executive producer of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said of Pelosi. “Literally, I have our booker e-mail her every Monday, but she’s not available. She does not seem to be making herself accessible.”

Other Sunday show producers agreed that some leading female politicians need to make a more concerted effort to make themselves available when the shows call, which the producers assert is often.

The implication is that female politicians — struggling to balance home, work and travel commitments in the same way many female business executives must — don’t lunge as frantically for the spotlight as many publicity-starved male politicians do.

Women make up 17 percent of the membership of the House and Senate, a proportion that is only a couple of percentage points higher than how often they appear on Sunday shows. But some advocates of more appearances by women said the shows should be working harder — with a kind of talking-heads version of affirmative action — to have women appear in numbers more closely approximating their percentage of society as a whole.

“Structuring the Sunday shows so women get visibility, even if they haven’t climbed the ladder, is important. The more national recognition these women get, the better their chances are of being elevated in Congress. Leadership wants the people with public image,” said Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women & Politics Institute.

“There aren’t a lot of people calling us to do Sunday shows,” said a prominent female House member’s press secretary, who did not want to be identified. “They largely go back to the same people, week after week. They’ve done a poor job of tapping into prominent female leaders, and that’s not just a problem for women on the Hill; it’s a problem for Americans because they are rarely hearing the women’s perspective. My boss isn’t chairing major committees, but there are many things she is heavily involved in and could still comment on.”

Thus far this year, the five major Sunday shows — including NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Fox News Sunday,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s “State of the Union” — have had 148 appearances by congressional lawmakers. Of those, 128 were men and 20 were women.

To read the full story: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38483.html