Why So Few Women in State Politics?

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/opinion/why-so-few-women-in-state-politics.html

Version 0 of 1.

State legislatures are where the coming generation of national leaders learn the ropes and get ahead. Still, for all the political energy from a record number of women candidates last year, they failed to crack an important barrier in statehouse politics. Greater success had been predicted by experts in the year of Hillary Clinton’s landmark candidacy.

Women candidates failed to win even 25 percent of the nation’s 7,383 legislative seats. The percentage of women legislators is stuck at 24.8 — not much more than it has been across this decade.

The total number of women winning in 2016 rose to 1,830, which is 22 more than the record set in 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But this is nowhere near the surge that was anticipated.

“These are really just blips in what looks like a flat line,” Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, told The Hill. Ms. Lawless, who has been tracking political ambition in women and men for 17 years, wasn’t optimistic when asked about the number of women at the recent Trump protest marches vowing to run for office.

The glass could stay 75 percent empty, she said, unless conditions change markedly to make politics more inviting to female candidates in the male-dominated arena.

The sexism that marked President Trump’s candidacy is one barrier for potential women candidates. But no less a factor is that women are far more likely to doubt that they are qualified to run for office (60 percent) than men (40 percent), according to the institute’s research. A result is that too few women are choosing to run, and party officials are less likely to encourage them to try.

“That falls somewhat on the women, themselves, to run, and that falls somewhat on the gatekeepers in the recruiting of candidates,” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told The Hill. This circular discouragement persists, despite research findings that women are as likely as men to win when they do choose to run. Basic changes are called for in both political parties’ outreach to female candidates and in women’s attitudes toward electoral politics.

The latest statistics show that the number of women in politics in this country lags far behind the numbers in other Western democracies. Women occupy more than 40 percent of parliamentary seats in Scandinavia and more than 30 percent in other European nations. And women are better represented in American state legislatures than they are in Congress, where women hold only 19 percent of the House seats and 21 percent of the Senate seats.

The tallies confirm that Democratic women in statehouses continue to have the edge on Republican women, 1,109 seats to 704. But Republican women have been showing a relative surge in recent years.

Whether the Trump political era galvanizes more women to run or discourages them remains to be seen. But the two parties have everything to gain by enriching their statehouse talent pools and confronting the underrepresentation of women in government. Innovations in recruitment and attitude are needed to get beyond the plateau that still characterizes American politics.