Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
‘We were just getting the job done’ with female majority
CARSON CITY — It was a common sight during the 2019 legislative session: Sen. Julia Ratti of Sparks, leaving the suite of Democratic leadership offices as the clock wound toward midnight.
Kelvin Atkinson’s resignation as majority leader in early March, after he’d admitted to misusing campaign funds, had moved Ratti up to assistant majority leader, and Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro of Las Vegas was promoted to Atkinson’s position.
As Ratti left one night, she glanced at the wall of photographs of previous Senate leaders hanging outside the office, recently updated to reflect the leadership change. There was Cannizzaro’s picture at the front of a long, all-male line of previous Senate leaders.
And in that moment, the
significance of the entire session, the first in the nation in which women sat in the legislative majority, came into relief for her.
“The circumstances under which Nicole became the majority leader — there wasn’t a whole lot of time for pomp and circumstance or celebration of this incredible milestone,” Ratti recalled in an interview last week. “Most of the time, we were too busy to be thinking about gender or how gender affected anything we were doing. We were just getting the job done.”
“So when you see that picture, and you see the long line of other photos,” she added, “it’s makes you pause.”
“Yes, we made history, but we got a lot of things done,” said Sen. Pat Spearman, a North Las Vegas Democrat, retired soldier and ordained minister elected in 2012. “It will say to people, unequivocally, that not only can women lead, but women are leading.”
What got done
Issues of particular interest or relevance to women were significant elements of the Democratic legislative blueprint: economic opportunity, health care, education, housing, and criminal and social justice.
“I don’t think it’s any surprise that those are the kinds of topics that got attention, because when you have that many women serving in the Legislature, they know that those are kind of critical life or death, or at least economic prosperity issues for women,” Ratti said.
From the ceremonies on the first day to national media attention, overlooking the historical nature of the session was impossible. The spotlight kept the female-focused agenda consistently at the forefront of policy discussions and put “an emphasis on women in leadership and women in politics and what it means to have women in that position,” Sen. Yvanna Cancela said.
On the list of accomplishments: new laws that strengthen the state’s domestic violence penalties, create a sexual assault survivors bill of rights, add permanent funding for rape kit testing at the state level, remove the requirement for a doctor to ask a woman if she’s married before she can get an abortion and provide money for family-planning services.
“I think there is a direct correlation between a majority female Legislature and the policies we brought forward,” Cancela said.
Another example is Spearman’s gender pay equity bill that easily passed the session and was signed into law. The first time she pushed the bill, four years ago, it got a single committee hearing but no vote. On the day it died, Spearman said, several male colleagues told her they “just don’t see a need for it.”
The proposal passed the Legislature in 2017, but was met with a veto from then-Gov. Brian Sandoval. This year was different. It passed by lopsided majorities in both houses and was promptly signed by Gov. Steve Sisolak.
“When we got down to talking about things that matter to women, I’m not saying it wouldn’t have happened if men had been in charge,” Spearman said. “But having a female majority, once those conversations started there was less we had to explain.”
Worth 1,000 words
Cancela had a similar moment of reflection in front of that wall. She, Ratti and Cannizzaro started their first terms together in 2017 and roomed together in Carson City this session.
“Just the visual representation of seeing Sen. Cannizzaro’s face on the wall after a sea of men, I think that’s a historic moment and I personally feel very honored to be a part of it,” she said.
Cannizzaro said she’s “probably still getting a little used to it, to seeing my face up there, to be sure.
“I’ve tried to stay focused on ensuring the things we need to do. I think it’s humbling and it’s an honor.”
Aside from celebratory moments bookending the session, the subject of the female majority rarely came up on its own. Having women break through the 50 percent threshold held big symbolic significance, but Ratti said the difference was slight.
“You don’t see a huge difference in governance between having 40 percent plus of the membership and 50 percent plus one, right?” she said. “In terms of the day-in and day-out governance, the kind of issues that we tackle, it wasn’t that significantly different from last session, because we had a pretty strong presence of women last session as well.”
A newcomer’s perspective
“When I put in my application to be appointed I really had no idea that we were so close to making history as the first female majority legislature,” said Dallas Harris, a Las Vegas lawyer for the Public Utilities Commission who was appointed to fill Aaron Ford’s Senate seat after Ford was elected attorney general. That majority happened officially when two women, Bea Duran and Rochelle Nguyen, were appointed to vacancies in mid-December.
“I was excited, and energized. I had no idea that I was actually going to have an opportunity to be part of something so big,” she said. “It’s not just this particular majority-female legislature. I think it’s a lot about who we are as well that made a very, very big difference. It’s not just women. It’s the group of women that we had.”
As for comparisons, “I don’t have a non-female-majority legislature to compare it to and to see how collegial it may have been, or what kind of bills were easier to pass or not,” she said. “I’d like to see us maintain this level of minimum representation. And we will simply wait for other states to catch up.”
A veteran lawmaker looks back
Back in the mid-1970s, when women in Nevada and elsewhere in the U.S. held only 5 to 10 percent of legislative seats, Joyce Woodhouse was a school teacher lobbying on behalf of K-12 education, and the message she heard in Carson City was: Women don’t belong here.
“I, in fact, was told by a legislator when I was a lobbyist that you need to go home, get married and have babies,” Woodhouse recalled. “That doesn’t go over too well, and it didn’t go over with me then, either.”
First elected to the Senate in 2006, she returned after a break in 2012. In 2019, her final session because of term limits, she led the critical Senate Finance Committee and passed a rewrite of the state’s half-century-old school funding plan along with colleague Mo Denis.
“It’s been gradual, you know, from 2007, my first session, to 2019, my last session, in how changes have come about, how women are in positions of chairing major committees like finance, and ways and means and commerce and labor, and judiciary,” she said.
“I’m not sure we all said it is a female-majority legislature for the first time in history in the U.S., so we can do these things. It was more of, ‘We’re here; let’s see what we can accomplish that’s good for our families, and our communities in the state.’”
Republicans lag
Democrats elect more women to legislatures than do Republicans. The numbers nationally are roughly 2-to-1 in favor of Democrats. Sen. Heidi Gansert, R-Reno, is the only Republican woman in the eight-member GOP Senate minority. This session, though, she was less isolated from her male colleagues.
In 2017, “I was the lone Republican on the Senate side who voted for the Equal Rights Amendment; I was the lone Republican who voted for 12 months of contraception for women,” Gansert said. “And this time, I had four colleagues and myself. So five Republicans voted to support equal rights and five colleagues voted on the contraceptive.”
Looking back at the session, “I recognized that there was significant legislation around women’s issues, whether it was sexual assault, sex trafficking, pay equity, domestic violence — all those things, you know, as simple as extending a temporary protection order from 30 to 45 days or coming up with the sexual assault survivors bill of rights. …”
Republican Assemblywoman Melissa Hardy, of Henderson, cited those same issues.
“Those are things women have historically fought for. Especially now, with the Me Too movement,” she said. “I think those are things that the nation and the state were thinking about and focusing on. I think that definitely had an effect on what we did in our Legislature.”
Overall, Gansert said, having more women in the majority “lent to an environment where we had more collegiality and collaboration, and while we didn’t agree, colleagues treated each other very respectfully. The partisanship was significantly reduced in this environment. So we disagreed on the issues, but everybody treated each other extremely well.”
Contact Colton Lochhead at clochhead@reviewjournal.com or 775-461-3820. Follow @ ColtonLochhead on Twitter. Contact Bill Dentzer at bdentzer@reviewjournal.com or 775-461-0661. Follow @DentzerNews on Twitter.