WHERE THE WOMEN AREN’T

After decades of climbing, the number of women in the state house – in Maine and nationally – has leveled off. Researchers have yet to determine why, although term limits and recruitment efforts may play a role. If there are barriers that are preventing women from running for office, they should be removed. The first step is to identify those barriers.

In 1969, 4 percent of state legislators were female. In 1991, women accounted for 22 percent of state lawmakers nationally.

In Maine, the number of women in the Legislature peaked in 1991 with |61 or almost 33 percent of the total. This percentage ranked Maine second in the country for female representation in state houses. This session, there are 44 women in the Legislature, accounting for less than 24 percent of lawmakers in Augusta.

“We’re disappointed that the number of women candidates seems stuck,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “We need women’s voices in state policy-making and in higher offices.

It all begins at the state legislative level, so we’re sorry not to see more women stepping forward to run.”

Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the center and professor of political science and women’s and gender studies at Rutgers, concludes that recruitment of women candidates is a major problem. It may be compounded by the fact that term limits have forced from the state house many women who entered politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“The mere existence of more political opportunities in term-limited states has not been sufficient to increase the number of women legislators in the absence of concerted efforts to recruit women to run for seats that have opened up,” Professor Carroll wrote in “The Book of States, 2004,” published by The Council of State Governments.

Further, Professor Carroll found that women often need more prodding than men to run for office. She cites a study that found that 11 percent of women, vs. 37 percent of men, said it was solely their own idea to run for the Legislature. Thirty-seven percent of women, and 18 percent of men, said they had not seriously thought about running until someone else suggested it.

These numbers show that something that was largely taken for granted – that the number of women in elective office would eventually reach about 50 percent, their share of the general population – has not happened. It is worth further research to find out why.