Women in statehouses are exception, not rule

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COLUMBUS, Ohio – While U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has marked a milestone for women in national politics, women are still waiting their turn in the statehouses.

Less than a quarter of state lawmakers across America are female, and the share has changed little in about a decade. Despite a slight gain in the overall percentage this year – to 23.5 percent, or 1,734 of 7,382 seats – many legislatures see the numbers slipping.

Women lost ground in 20 of 50 statehouses following the November election. This year, 17.4 percent of the Ohio Legislature is female, down from 18.4 percent in 2006. That’s 23 of 132 lawmakers, down from 24 the year before.

Nationally, 344 women served as state representatives and senators in 1971, 908 in 1981, 1,368 in 1991 and 1,666 in 2001.

“I’ve watched the numbers for years, and I’m disappointed,” said former Ohio House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson, co-chair of the Republican National Committee. “I would have hoped that by now we’d be going in another direction, but we’re not.”

Pelosi was elected the first female speaker of the House in January. Her position as the most powerful woman in a U.S. elective office could help bump the state-level numbers in 2008, Davidson and other trend watchers said.

Such a jump last happened in 1992, when Hillary Clinton began gaining attention for her hands-on approach as first lady – an effect that has been sustained as Clinton has continued into higher office.

“It makes people comfortable with women in leadership,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “She [Pelosi] is on the front page almost every day, above the fold. People see a woman operating in the world successfully and that can’t help but help.”

South Carolina State Rep. Cathy Harvin, a Democrat who took over the seat of her late husband, said the odds still may be against women.

The ratio of women in her state’s Legislature is the lowest in the nation at 8.8 percent, compared with a leading 37.2 percent in Vermont, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And South Carolina’s only female senator, Linda Short, has said she won’t run for re-election next year.

“Whether it be corporate or political, it is certainly more challenging for women here to find themselves in leadership roles,” Harvin said. “That might be an offspring of a religious belief that is still prevalent in the South that a woman’s place is perhaps in the home, as opposed to in the House of Representatives or the Senate or corporate America.”

Katie Fischer, policy associate for the Women’s Legislative Network of the NCSL, said other factors are also at play – including the unexpected disadvantage brought on by term limits and some women’s reticence to seek office.

“One possible reason is the increased level of partisanship and the very intense politicalness that exists in our country right now,” Fischer said. “There’s such a divide between Democrat and Republican, left and right, that they don’t see it as an environment they want to be involved in.”

She said running and serving as a woman has become easier over time in legislatures where the numbers are already comparatively high, such as those in Vermont and New Hampshire. Both saw rises this year in the percentages of female lawmakers, while some with already low numbers experienced declines.

Davidson, 79, said women lead differently and may be turned off by the current intensity.

“We tend to be consensus builders,” she said. “Our leadership styles are different because most of us who are a little older learned our leadership skills in volunteer organizations, where you can’t take a top-down approach.”

But Vermont’s Democratic House Speaker Gaye Symington said Pelosi’s rise to power in the U.S. House will prove a point that Symington has long been making to women: The arts of negotiation, compromise and relationship building that women practice so well at home are perfectly suited to law-making.

The more women who have served in Vermont, she said, the more women who want to – yet the obstacles are still there.

“When I came to the Legislature, my children were 2, 5 and 7. My biggest campaign expense was child care. My biggest expense as a legislator was child care,” said Symington, 53. “Yet they’ll reimburse for a room or for mileage to and from the statehouse, but not for that. It’s a real juggling act, and that holds women back.”

Walsh said limiting the number of terms lawmakers can serve was supposed to open up a system dominated by white men to more diversity, namely women and minorities. But it hasn’t happened.

“There was a power in incumbency. Women would get in and 98 percent of the time they would get re-elected, so you just needed a few new women in each time,” she said. “But with term limits, you get this wholesale loss of women and you’ve got to get a whole lot to run to make up for it.”

Last year, female candidacies for seats in the Maine House of Representatives were up sharply, according to State House counts, rising from 78 two years before to 95. The roster of women seeking election to the Senate numbered 26 – tied for second-highest of the female fields in the last eight cycles, legislative research suggested.

The November election results meant more women serving. There are 45 women in the Maine House, an increase of 16 over the previous term, and 12 women in the Maine Senate, an increase from 11 last session.

The first women legislators – three Republican representatives in Colorado – were elected in 1894. The first woman state senator was elected in 1896. But until the 1970s, their numbers remained small. Between 1971 and 1981, the percentage of women in statehouses rose nationally from 4.5 percent to 12.1 percent and the gains continued steadily through the early 1990s, according to statistics compiled by Walsh’s women in politics center at Rutgers.

Political parties and some nonpartisan organizations, such as The White House Project, are working to recruit, train and inspire more women candidates at the state level, with the hope that they will be ready to run when the opportunity arises – perhaps in the next election cycle. The White House Project’s goal is a woman president.

Fischer said those efforts may be important, because women don’t always push themselves as candidates.

“In general, women are much more likely to not decide to run on their own, they are recruited or maybe have worked in the background a lot and finally someone says, ‘Why don’t you run?”‘ she said. “Men tend to be self-starters.”

Harvin said that in South Carolina three of the 14 female state lawmakers are either widow or spouse of a former lawmaker, which is viewed as a socially acceptable way in the door.

Women’s family obligations – particularly during their child-bearing years – can be an impediment to serving, Fischer said. Many legislatures are part time and pay little, leaving women lawmakers to pay for child care, meet their legislative obligations and hold down a full-time job.

Harvin said family matters recently made for some awkward moments for the male speaker of the South Carolina House after a legislator had just had a baby.

“We passed a piece of legislation that made it lawful for women to breast-feed in public and the speaker of the House, when reminded of that legislation, was greatly unnerved to think that he might be looking down upon someone choosing to exercise her right,” she said. “Fortunately for him, she was beyond her period of nursing when she returned to the House.”

Fischer said Pelosi’s inclusion of her children and grandchildren in her swearing-in festivities may have eased situations like this for women in the future.

“She’s embracing her skills as a mother of five, whereas 20 years ago a woman wouldn’t have touted that as her qualification. There was more pressure to downplay the motherhood,” Fischer said. “Maybe the Nancy Pelosi experience will change that.”