"... political women have gone from anomalies to mainstream, though they still are underrepresented"

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Despite Leaps, Women Lag in Politics
By Albert R. Hunt, March 16, 2014

On Friday, the Showtime cable network is to air “Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way,” a documentary about her 1984 race for vice president. Although she was defeated, her candidacy was a seminal moment in politics that was validated by the subsequent leap in the number of women holding office.

In three decades, political women have gone from anomalies to mainstream, though they still are underrepresented. The odds are, in two years, the Democrats will nominate a woman for president, and there’s an even chance that the Republican candidate will choose a female running mate.

The best research on these issues is from the Center for American Women and Politics, a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

When Ms. Ferraro was picked as Walter F. Mondale’s running mate, she was one of only 22 women among the 435 members of the House of Representatives. There were only two senators: Nancy Kassebaum and Paula Hawkins, both Republicans.

Now there are 79 women in the House and 20 in the Senate. In 1984, there was only one female governor, Martha Layne Collins of Kentucky. It was only 10 years earlier that Americans elected the first female governor who didn’t succeed her husband: Connecticut’s Ella T. Grasso. Since then, 30 women have served as governors.

California and New York have never had a female chief executive, while Arizona has been governed by a woman for the past 17 years. There are almost twice as many female state legislators today as there were in 1984.

Yet for all that progress, women occupy only 24 percent of state legislative seats, 10 percent of the governorships and account for less than 20 percent of Congress. They make up 51 percent of the population.

A study of more than 2,000 college students by the political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox shows that despite the presence of high-profile figures such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Representative Nancy Pelosi, young women still are less likely to evince an interest in politics. Men are more likely to think of themselves as more qualified. Another factor: More men than women participate in athletics, and the psychological and verbal similarities between politics and sports are striking.

The biggest hurdles for women, Ms. Lawless says, are “political recruitment and self-perceived qualifications.”

The strides have been politically lopsided, as more Democrats seek and win political office. Most of the female governors elected since Ms. Grasso have been Democrats, though four of the five holding office today are Republicans. Female Democrats have an advantage over female Republicans of almost 2 to 1 in state legislatures; that ratio rises to more than 3 to 1 in Congress.

A major reason is Emily’s List, the political action committee that has been recruiting and training female candidates since the year after Ms. Ferraro’s historic run. In this cycle, the group is training 1,000 women to run for office, assuring them that they’re qualified and in demand. “Our job is to make at least seven asks” of every possible candidate, said Stephanie Schriock, who heads Emily’s List.

Women used to have a disadvantage in fund-raising. Emily’s List has created a network of donors that has leveled the playing field. Other than President Obama and Ms. Clinton, the two most prolific money machines on the Democrats’ side may be Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Wendy Davis, who is running for governor of Texas.

There is no Republican equivalent of Emily’s List, and the party lags in attracting candidates. “The Republican Party’s brand has veered so far right,” says Olympia J. Snowe, former senator and representative of Maine, who was first elected to Congress in 1978, that “it’s not enticing for many potential women candidates to run as Republicans.”

Even today, there are residual sexist elements, though they pale in comparison with the attitudes in 1984, when there was a fetish about Ms. Ferraro’s appearance and attire. One local official asked if she knew how to bake a good blueberry muffin. “Sure can,” she replied. “Can you?”
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