11 September 2008
Parties Recruit More Women to Vote Than to Run
Political action committees are getting more women elected
Washington — If the recent party conventions are any indication, women in American politics and the importance of women’s votes today are acknowledged vigorously by Democrats and Republicans. Yet women remain numerically underrepresented in elected office.
More women hold public office in the United States than ever before, serving in both houses of Congress, and occupying important local- and state-level positions, including governorships.
Sixteen of the 100 U.S. senators and 71 of the 435 U.S. House members are women. Eight of the 50 governors are women, and the proportion of women in state legislatures is at 23.7 percent, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Many winners can thank women’s political action committees (PACs) for their success. These PACs fundraise and help campaign for women candidates. The most influential PACs are “pro-choice,” backing candidates who support a woman’s right to choose abortion. Democratic EMILY’s List and Republican counterpart WISH List are two such groups. Republican Susan B. Anthony List — named after a progressive, 19th-century women’s suffragist — and Democrats for Life of America are PACs that fund anti-abortion, “pro-life” candidates.
They have had “a tremendous impact,” said Barbara Palmer, from American University’s Women in Politics Institute.
“For the past few election cycles, if you do the math, female congressional candidates, at least, actually raise more money, on average, than their male counterparts, so we have definitely closed the gender gap there. And that is due to the activism of women PACs,” she told America.gov.
For the second time in history, a woman is a vice-presidential running mate of a major U.S. political party. The selection of Sarah Palin by John McCain for the Republican ticket is a first for that party. Democrat Geraldine Ferraro was Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984.
Women of both parties, not necessarily in agreement with Palin’s politics, have lauded McCain’s choice of a woman for the ticket.
Jennifer Lawless is a Brown University political science professor, former candidate for a Rhode Island congressional seat, and co-author of a Brookings Institution study, “Why Are Women Still Not Running for Public Office?”
Lawless told America.gov her research on hurdles facing women in politics “made me realize that women who know that those barriers exist have to be willing to overcome them.” So at age 31, in 2006, Lawless challenged the three-term incumbent in her Rhode Island congressional district, James Langevin, because he was “out of sync with his constituents and me on issues that I cared most about.”
Lawless did not win, but did get 40 percent of the vote. “It could have been better,” she said.
Scholarly criteria to identify bias or the relevance of gender in elections do not necessarily measure “the kinds of things that actually happen day to day on the campaign trail. When women run for office, overall, they fare as well as their male counterparts, but that in no way gauges whether or not the playing field or the experiences for women are comparable to those of men,” she said.
She said she encountered no “overt sexism,” but was labeled by the media in ways her opponent was not.
She said PACs have played an “instrumental role in providing support and infrastructure to women who had already decided to run for office, and who were launching formidable campaigns.” She was endorsed by 11 organizations, but not EMILY’s List, probably because of early slow fundraising.
“I think that these organizations, traditionally, pick the battles that they thought they have the best shot at winning, which is obviously critical if we want to increase the number of women in Congress,” Lawless said.
New, nonpartisan organizations are emerging that are not limited to the divisive abortion issue, such as The White House Project and Women Under Forty PAC.
“I do think we are seeing an expansion in terms of the kinds of issues that are at stake,” Lawless said.
“Political action committees are extending their reach and trying to bring more women into the process,” she added, and that “is allowing more women access to the gatekeepers who ultimately might then recruit them to run.”
PACs now educate women in how to run for office. Low confidence, lack of recruitment by powerful party “gatekeepers,” and incursions on privacy and family life are chief inhibitors, Lawless found.
The high visibility of women at political conventions may belie their low numbers in office, but Lawless maintains that “because of these visible women, male candidates have to respond to their presence and have to respond to female constituents’ demands, so that, in and of itself, is a good thing for policy in terms of representing women’s interests.”
Palmer adds: “Once you get more women into political office, they may not necessarily vote different from their male counterparts, but they change their agenda. They bring things to the table that men aren’t necessarily against, it just isn’t the highest priority for them.”
