Why Does the US Still Have So Few Women in Office?

This article by Steven Hill in The Nation features RepresentWomen's original Gender Parity Index. Read an excerpt below.

With Hillary Clinton the early front-runner in the 2016 Democratic primary, the United States may join the UK, Germany, Brazil and Argentina as democracies that have had a woman as their top leader. Yet the alarming reality is that American women are still vastly underrepresented in elected offices all across the nation. Remember the “Year of the Woman” in 1992? Two decades later women still hold less than 20 percent of congressional seats, despite composing a majority of the US population.

And compared to other nations, the United States is losing ground. America now ranks ninety-eighth in the world for percentage of women in its national legislature, down from 59th in 1998. That’s embarrassing: just behind Kenya and Indonesia, and barely ahead of the United Arab Emirates. Only five governors are women, including just one Democrat, and twenty-four states have never had a female governor. The percentage of women holding statewide and state legislative offices is less than 25 percent, barely higher than in 1993. Locally, only twelve of our 100 largest cities have female mayors.

The reality is that at the current glacial rate of progress, “women won’t achieve fair representation for nearly 500 years,” says Cynthia Terrell, chair of FairVote’s “Representation 2020” project, which has released a new study on women’s representation.

Read the complete article on The Nation here.

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