The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Female Ga. legislators still face glass ceiling
Record numbers elected, but women absent from top rungs of power.
State Rep. Sally Harrell had recently given birth to her first child in January 2000 when she received a phone call from one of the most powerful men in Georgia politics.
Then-speaker Tom Murphy had heard that the first-term lawmaker was planning to bring her newborn son — who, at 3 weeks old, was too young to be accepted into day care — to the impending legislative session. The news had ignited a brushfire among some of the General Assembly’s more traditional members, who were taken aback by the idea of a baby in the House chamber, not to mention the thought of one who was still nursing.
“I’ve been here 27 years, and I’ve never had this
problem,” Murphy told Harrell, who now represents a Dunwoody-based state Senate district.
It’s hard to imagine a similar conversation today. A century after the 19th Amendment was adopted, opening the door for women to vote and hold public office, the General Assembly boasts a record number of female legislators, including several who are young mothers. The state has the highest percentage of women lawmakers of any Legislature in the South.
But the unprecedented numbers obscure a glaring fact: Women have yet to hold any of the top positions under the Gold Dome.
With few exceptions, the top decision-makers in all three branches of state government are men. None of the General Assembly’s most powerful committees, the ones that control the state’s purse strings and are closest to party leadership, has ever been run by a woman. There has never been a female governor or lieutenant governor, nor a woman House speaker or Senate president pro tempore.
Part of the discrepancy stems from recruitment. The women who are running and being elected to the statehouse are mostly Democrats, but the Legislature is currently controlled by Republicans, a party that says it eschews identity politics.
The dearth of powerful women has vast implications for the kinds of issues that come before the statehouse and how they’re approached.
Twisting arms
Women currently make up 30% of the General Assembly, but that wasn’t the case when Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, arrived at the statehouse as a representative in 1987. Only 1 in 10 legislators was female, and there wasn’t even a women’s restroom on the Senate side of the Capitol.
If women lawmakers had lunch together, Orrock said, it “was viewed as threatening and frowned upon” by the male Democratic leaders who ruled the statehouse with an iron fist. Back then, it was all but impossible for women to break into the institution’s inner circles.
Still, as a former community activist, Orrock convinced many of her Democratic and Republican female colleagues to create the Georgia Legislative Women’s Caucus. The group’s purpose was to find areas of agreement on matters impacting women and families and to pursue them legislatively even if male colleagues weren’t interested.
The caucus’ first order of business was securing federal funding for child care programs. Then came a slew of bills on an issue that once bridged the political divide: health care.
Early victories included measures mandating minimum hospital stays for women after giving birth and requiring health insurers to cover tests ranging from mammograms to cervical cancer screenings.
A bipartisan group of female representatives would line the walls of the mostly male Senate chamber as they voted. It was a strategy the group relied on again and again.
“We went over there and twisted arms and looked in their eyes,” said Orrock, who was a floor leader for Gov. Zell Miller.
In 2005, the caucus fought a measure that would have stripped many of those same mandates from the law and managed to save key parts of the health initiatives the bipartisan group had fought so hard for.
The group remained a force for a while, but eventually Republican legislators left. Issues like health care were becoming increasingly politicized, especially after the passage in Congress of the Affordable Care Act. A polarized electorate demanded even greater party loyalty.
Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, joined the caucus after being elected to the House in 1999, but has since left the group. She said she no longer sees a need for it “because we’ve been integrated and are doing better.”
“But, back in the day, we did have to fight,” she said.
Dwindling GOP women
The transition of the Women’s Caucus into a de facto single-party group made it even harder for rank-and-file female legislators to wield influence as a bloc.
Women have run for office in record numbers in Georgia in 2018 and 2020, but mostly as Democrats. Women make up the majority of the Democratic caucus in the General Assembly, but men are in the top party positions in both the House and Senate and the minority has limited powers.
At the same time, the number of elected female Republicans has flattened over the last decade.
When Unterman retires at the end of the year, there could be only one GOP woman serving in the Georgia Senate. One female Republican incumbent is running for reelection and another is seeking to fill the seat of a retiring GOP senator.
Of the women serving in the House, 15 are Republicans and 42 are Democrats.
Some observers attribute the yawning gender gap to recruitment.
While Democrats have a bevy of established, deep-pocketed groups like Emily’s List and Georgia WIN List dedicated to recruiting and training female candidates, GOP women lack a similar network of outside support. The Republican Party hasn’t traditionally gone out of its way to recruit women or minorities for office, but that’s beginning to change.
The D.C.-based Republican State Leadership Committee announced plans earlier this year to aid three incumbent GOP women in the Georgia House and five challengers through its “Right Women, Right Now” initiative.
“Women are the majority in this country — they’re 54% of voters,” said President Austin Chambers, a Georgia native who previously worked on the campaigns of Gov. Brian Kemp and U.S. Sen. David Perdue. “If we want to be a majority party long-term, we better become a party of women.”
Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who presides over the state Senate, said he’s made it a priority to use his independent fund Advance Georgia to seek out and support Republican candidates who are women and people of color.
His group is backing Sheila McNeil, a woman seeking to fill a vacant seat on the Georgia coast.
Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller, a Gainesville Republican, said he believes there is room for the chamber to create an environment that’s more welcoming to women.
“We’ll never do enough for a cause that is just
‘Women are the majority in this country — 54% of voters. If we want to be a majority party longterm, we better become a party of women.’ Austin Chambers
President, GOP State Leadership Committee