An interesting post from a law professor blog, written by a professor who teaches in South Carolina:

South Carolina's state govt is only the fifth most dysfunctional state govt in the nation

At least according to this article, which claims the six states with the worst leadership are:

6. California
5. South Carolina
4. Alaska
3. Illinois
2. Nevada
1. New York

I'm sure the fact that we have the fewest women in state government in the nation is only a coincidence.

It's often difficult to tell whether a post is serious or sarcastic, but here the last sentence seems pretty clearly sarcastic -- and it doesn't hurt that the "Posted in" links below include "Yep, sarcasm" (as well as "Feminism and Politics" and "The Underrepresentation of Women"). So I take it that the assertion is that it's not a coincidence that South Carolina has both dysfunctional state government and a low number of women in state government.

As it happens, though, the very item that the post links to helps check that assertion; we can see the rankings along the women-in-state-government metric for each of the six states, and not just South Carolina. Here they are: New York is #22; Nevada is #12; Illinois is #17; Alaska is #27; South Carolina is #50; California is #15. The average is just a titch below #25. Likewise, if one averages together the percentages of women in the state legislature in those six states, one gets 23.83%, almost indistinguishable from the nationwide 23.5% average.

Naturally, it's possible that other data that's out there does show that some correlation between dysfunctional government and a low number of women in government. Perhaps it might even show causation; who knows? But the data that the post links to -- if one looks at all six states, and not just the fifth state of those six -- shows no correlation at all.