Hi Rulers! I’ve been treasuring these fleeting days of fake fall in the District before things heat back up again next week. Here’s to a short second summer before real fall sets in. Before we all melt, let’s get into it: Progress toward gender parity in politics slowed in 2024 — a quiet shift after a streak of record-breaking years for women’s political candidacies. While Kamala Harris makes history this year as the first woman of color atop a presidential ticket, some political organizers are hoping her candidacy will pull more women back into power. After 2018 was dubbed a second “year of the woman,” — the first being in 1992 — marking a record number of women running for the highest offices in the country, women continued to reach new highs in the subsequent elections: 583 women ran for the House in 2020 and 2022, and 70 women ran for the Senate in 2022, according to data from Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics. In 2024, those numbers dropped back down to 466 for the House and 52 for the Senate, a conspicuous decline after years of steady growth. “Progress for women in politics appears to be slowing, if not stalling,” RepresentWomen warned in its 2024 Gender Parity Index last month, noting that women are still significantly underrepresented at all levels of U.S. government. Emily Cherniack, founder and director of New Politics, a nonpartisan organization that recruits political candidates from the military and other service organizations, says the stagnating numbers of women running for office indicates that progress toward parity has hit a critical roadblock. “What we're seeing is we're hitting a ceiling around structural barriers,” Cherniack tells Women Rule. “We can't see more numbers until we really think about the structures that are barriers for women running for office.” Fundamental barriers to access — particularly financial and child care constraints — persist for women who want to run for office. Because of underlying gender pay gaps women are less likely to enter a campaign with a lot of cash on reserve. And running a campaign essentially entails working “for free for a year,” as Cherniack says, which is an unrealistic ask for many women who also need to provide for families and/or care for children. According to Kristie De Peña, a senior vice president at Republican Women for Progress, Covid-19 exacerbated these preexisting disparities as the pandemic “gutted” the cohort of women who would have considered a bid for office — but were instead pulled out of the workforce to care for both elderly parents and young children. Getting into politics is also often a matter of playing the long game — close to half of members of Congress got their start in state legislatures. But in many states, serving in the legislature pays abysmally, and male legislators are more likely to make more money in secondary jobs than women, reinforcing the financial disparities between women and men running for office. For the most part, those fundamental obstacles remain unchanged. But organizers working to recruit and support women running for office are also seeing new challenges beginning to materialize: The rise of political polarization and toxicity is compounding the classic logistical hurdles of finances and child care. The intense polarization in today’s politics is a turnoff for women looking to effect policy change, according to De Peña, who believes that’s the primary factor deterring women from running for office, aside from the structural barriers they face. “When they see the loudest people on the national stage are not the ones who are leading the way on solutions, I think that it is incredibly deflating for anybody who otherwise might have wanted to run,” she says. What’s more, the cultural toxicity at play in the political arena also poses safety issues for many women campaigning for office. According to a report released by the Brennan Center for Justice in February, women holding state and local office — particularly women of color — face disproportionate abuse and threats compared to their white male counterparts, often adding financial strain due to security costs. Diana Hwang, founder of the Asian American Women's Political Initiative, says the rise in personal attacks has “become a deterrent” for women of color considering bids for political office and is leading others who already hold office to retire. For women of color running for office, Hwang says, “everything that you experience in the world — racism, sexism, discrimination — it’s all jumbled together then directed exactly at you. Your campaign is like a microcosm of everything you experience in the world.” Hwang, who is Asian American, knows firsthand the hostility women of color face when running for office. In 2016, she ran for Massachusetts state senate — and lost. She says campaigning can be a lonely process. “Politics is war,” Hwang tells me. “So we need to create the opposite — build a new kind of political power that is rooted in love and joy and lifting each other up.” She hopes Harris will create that positive momentum, noting that her candidacy has already “changed the game,” and “energized” the AAPI community. While many of the barriers to entry for women will still require dismantling, political organizers like Hwang and Christina Reynolds of EMILYs List hope that Harris’ candidacy will give women the boost they need to get back to setting records and advancing toward parity. “I bet there’s going to be a Kamala bump,” Reynolds says, referring to the spike in women running for elected office after Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016, known as the “Hillary bump.” Already, Reynolds says, she’s heartened by what she sees as a change in the rhetoric around women politicians. Citing the array of speakers at this week’s Democratic National Convention, Reynolds says: “All of those people are leaders. Those are all candidates — we're not saying ‘here are the candidates, and then there's women candidates.’”
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