Because of my experiences with these organizations working both with women candidates and young women aspiring to leadership, after 2020, I founded DemocraShe to be a long-term strategy: training intersectional high school female-identifying students to be our youngest bench of future transformational female legislators. For America to be the country she has never been but absolutely could be, we need intentional, strategic investment in our candidates for elected office from communities that have historically been left out, and we need it early.
I think everyone here agrees: Representation matters. One in four women have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime; if 50% of all legislators were women, I have to believe they would be more on top of this. Hundreds of thousands of rape kits
currently sit untested in this country – do you think they would stand for that? Black maternal health outcomes continue to be abysmal despite having it pointed out over and over; imagine if there were enough black women legislators to demand accountability.
And as we watch with horror, the supreme court set to eviscerate Roe v Wade and reproductive justice for women in this country- Imagine the reproductive rights conversation if 50% of all legislators in office were women.
Yet after 100 years of women having the right to vote, we remain much too far from our goals of parity and equity. In celebrating the most women ever to hold office, only 30% of state legislators are female, and only 18% of governors are female. Only 27% of Congress is female, and women of color make up only 8% of all elected officials in this country. The lived experience of the radiantly intersectional spectrum of women is woefully underrepresented in American government. According to a study that just came out, if we keep up our current trajectory, we will reach parity in the year 2108. That’s 88 years from now. Are we going to wait for that? No, my friends, we are not!
And it shouldn’t be this way. Statistics show when women run, women and men are elected at the same rate. So why are women so underrepresented in government? We keep hitting the same problem: Despite our achievements, the stubborn fact remains that simply not enough women run. In 2018, “The year of the woman,“ women candidates in California were outnumbered by men by a 4 to 1 margin. In 2020, fewer than 30% OF CANDIDATES for Congress were women.
We have to change this. And if we are to realize a country that we will be proud to call America, we have to be investing in building the infrastructure for what that looks like now.
