In the News
August 23, 2024
This article by Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing was published in the newsletter, Politico Women Rule. It cites the 2024 Gender Parity Index.
Read an excerpt below.
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.”
Read the complete article in Politico Women Rule here.
