Los Angeles Times

Women vastly underrepre­sented in statehouse­s

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Democrat Kayla Young and Republican Patricia Rucker frequently clash on abortion rights and just about everything else in West Virginia’s Legislatur­e, but they agree on one thing: Too few of their colleagues are women, and it’s hurting the state.

“There are exceptions to every single rule, but I think in general, men do kind of see this as their field,” said Rucker, part of the GOP’s Senate supermajor­ity that passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans while Young — the lone Democratic woman elected to the House — opposed it.

Nearly 130 years since the first three women were elected to state legislativ­e offices in the U.S., women remain massively underrepre­sented in state legislatur­es.

In 10 states, women make up less than 25% of their state legislatur­es, according to Rutgers University’ Center for American Women and Politics. West Virginia is at the bottom of that list, having just 16 women in its 134member Legislatur­e, or just under 12%. That’s compared with Nevada, where women occupy just over 60% of state legislativ­e seats. Similarly low numbers are found in the nearby Southern states of Mississipp­i, South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana.

“It’s absolutely wild to know that more than 50% of the population of West Virginia are women, and sometimes I’m the only woman that’s on a committee, period,” said Young, the only woman on the House Artificial Intelligen­ce Committee and one of two on the House Judiciary Committee when it greenlight­ed the state’s near-total abortion ban.

The numbers of women filling legislativ­e seats across the U.S. have remained low despite women registerin­g and voting at higher rates than men in every presidenti­al election since 1980 — and across virtually every demographi­c, including race, education and socioecono­mic status.

For the last three decades, voters have demonstrat­ed a willingnes­s to cast ballots for women. But they didn’t have the opportunit­y to do so because women weren’t running, said Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia.

“The gender gap in political ambition is just as large now as it was then,” said Lawless, adding that women are much less likely to get recruited to run for office or think they’re qualified to run in what they perceive as a hostile political environmen­t. And those running in Southern, conservati­ve states — still mostly Democratic women, data show — aren’t winning as those states still overwhelmi­ngly elect Republican­s.

In 2022, 39 women ran as their party’s nominee for legislativ­e seats in West Virginia, and 26 were Democrats. Only two of the Democrats won, compared with 11 of 13 Republican­s.

Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, said there’s more money, infrastruc­ture and support for recruiting and running Democratic female candidates. The Republican Party often shies away from talking about what is labeled or dismissed as “identity politics,’” she said.

Larissa Martinez, founder and president of Women’s Public Leadership Network, one of only a few right-leaning U.S. organizati­ons solely supporting female candidates, said identity politics within the GOP is a big hurdle to her work. Part of her organizati­on’s slogan is, “We are pro-women without being anti-man.”

In 2020, small-town teacher Amy Grady pulled off a huge upset when she defeated then-state Senate President Mitch Carmichael in West Virginia’s Republican primary after back-toback years of strikes in which school employees packed into the Capitol.

Carmichael took in more than $127,000 in contributi­ons, compared with Grady’s self-funded $2,000. Still, Grady won by fewer than 1,000 votes.

“It’s just you’re told constantly, ‘You can’t, you can’t, you can’t do it,’ ” said Grady, who has risen through the ranks to become chair of the Senate Education Committee. “And it’s just like, why give it a shot?”

Tennessee state Sen. Charlane Oliver says she didn’t have many resources when she first raised her hand to run. She had to rely on grassroots activism to win in 2022.

Yet securing the seat was just part of the battle. Oliver, a 41-year-old Black Democrat, is frequently tasked with providing the only outside perspectiv­e for the Republican supermajor­ity Legislatur­e.

“They don’t have any incentive to listen to me, but I view my seat as disruption and give you a perspectiv­e that you may not have heard before,” she said.

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