Why a majority-female City Council matters
The people we elect to City Hall profoundly shape the policies, decisions and legislation that determine our future. For the first time in New York City’s history, the majority of those people will be women.
This exciting change is more than symbolic. Female leaders govern differently. Studies show they’re more likely to seek compromise and rise above partisan bickering to get things done. And by sending 31 women to the City Council — including 23 women who are first-time elected officials — New York is building a bench of female leaders who could one day lead our city, our state and our country.
The makeup of the 2022 New York City Council is both unprecedented and long overdue. Despite the fact that more than half of New Yorkers are women, we have never had a female mayor, and our local legislature has always been majority-men.
Little by little, however, we have been paving the way — from 1918, when Mary M. Lilly was elected to the Assembly in the first election that women could run in; to 1937, when Genevieve B. Earle was the first woman elected to the New York City Council; to 2006, when I was honored to serve as the City Council’s first female speaker.
We have seen that change accelerate in the last decade. In 2012, state Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins became the first woman to lead a conference in the Legislature. In 2018, Barbara Underwood became the first woman to serve as attorney general, immediately followed by Letitia James. And this year Kathy Hochul became New York’s first female governor. Councilwoman Adrienne Adams is now poised to become the third woman to lead the Council out of the last four speakers.
New Yorkers are lucky to have so many talented women representing them next year, and while each of these 31 local legislators will govern in their own way, drawing on their unique experiences and their constituents’ needs, the data show they will serve us better than their male predecessors.
On the federal level, female lawmakers have been found to pass up to twice as many bills as men and secure roughly 9% more funding for their districts. An analysis of state legislators across the country found that women lawmakers respond to their constituents at higher rates and with more actionable information — even when controlling for staffing levels. With a female majority for the first time, this Council has the potential to be more productive, more effective and more involved than at any point in our city’s history.
But a more effective City Council is not all New Yorkers have to look forward to. Passing more legislation is good — but passing good legislation is better. Here, too, the women have the men beat.
Studies show that women legislators are far more likely to sponsor legislation on topics like civil rights, health and education — issues that will improve New Yorkers’ lives. We can expect our councilmembers to base their legislative priorities on their own lived experiences, focusing on issues like criminal justice reform, affordable housing, and how our schools can recover from the pandemic.
Beyond enacting more and more meaningful policies and better serving their constituents, our female-majority City Council will also have another major impact: Girls throughout the city will now have 31 new role models. This could be life-changing, because for many of our youngest New Yorkers the old adage that “if you can’t see it, you don’t know you can be it” still holds true.
The reality is that, even in 2021 America, girls are too often incorrectly told or subtly shown that they are not as good as boys. Now, girls in the nation’s largest city will turn on the TV, open a newspaper or attend a political rally, see these female councilmembers, and understand that the naysayers were wrong. They can achieve anything they put their mind to.
The importance of female representation cannot be overstated, especially with a group of individuals as diverse and barrier-breaking as this one. The 2022 Council class includes the first Muslim woman, South-Asian woman, Korean-American woman and LGBTQ Black woman to serve on the Council — representing the beautiful mosaic of our city. Women are also poised to change executive leadership in City Hall: Just this week, Mayor-elect Eric Adams announced that five of the most senior deputy mayors will be women, serving alongside the city’s first-ever female police commissioner.
This is a future that Assemblymember Lilly and Councilwoman Earle could have only dreamed of. And I know our incoming leaders will live up to their legacy.