Women hold 24.3 percent of seats in state legislatures throughout the United States. This percentage is barely up from 24.2 percent of seats before the 2014 election, inching state legislatures only slightly closer to gender parity. If we continue at this snail’s pace, we will wait centuries to reach gender parity. However, there are simple, tried, tested and proven effective structural changes that American state legislatures can adopt to speed up progress to gender parity: multi-winner districts.     

The United States currently ranks 94th out of 189 countries for the representation of women in the lower house.  If the United States continues at the current rate, it will take generations to reach gender parity. Other nations, like Finland and Denmark are striding much more quickly toward gender parity in elected office. In part, our slow progress toward gender parity is due to structural barriers that inhibit women’s recruitment, election and ability to serve. The United States must reform its single-winner district system and engage in intentional legislative and party actions to increase the representation of women.

This week the Arizona Cardinals announced that they had hired Jen Welter to be their assistant coach during the team’s training camp and preseason. The decision makes her the first woman to hold any type of coaching position in the NFL. Welter has continuously broken barriers to women’s participation in professional sports, attaining a coaching position in February from the Texas Revolution of the Champions Indoor Football league, which made her the first woman to coach in a male professional football league. As the team’s historical decision is just the first step in the process towards gender parity in sports, one begins to consider how the representation of women fares in other fields.

After the 2014 election, the U.S. narrative of women’s representation has focused on the  gains that women have achieved this cycle. Because a record number of 104 women have entered Congress this session, media outlets tend to ignore that there is also a trend of backtracking and stagnation in states’ progress toward gender parity in elected office.

In national elected offices, women are severely under-represented. As Representation 2020 (a project of FairVote) highlights, women currently women hold only 18% of U.S. House seats. The 2014 midterm elections are right around the corner, and 160 women are running for seats in the U.S. House. Will the 2014 midterm elections bring the U.S. House closer to gender parity? Using FairVote’s Monopoly Politics 2014 Report, we projected the results for these candidates come November 4th. Here are a few of the highlights.

Our nation’s 100 largest cities have a combined population of more than 61 million, which represents nearly a fifth of all Americans. Representation 2020’s research into representation of women in these city elections has striking implications for the impact of electoral structure on the likelihood of women running and winning. Here are our initial findings.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” – Declaration of Sentiments, July 19, 1848

As FairVote has noted before, voters want to elect both men and women. Consequently, a successful political party must be inclusive of both men and women. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, it currently has a problem with women. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost the women's vote by 11%, despite losing the general election by only 4%. President Obama won among single women by an enormous 36%.  A recent CNN Poll  found that 59% of women feel that the GOP is out of touch with their gender.

Oregon's Monica Wehby seeks to increase the number of Republican women in the U.S. Senate

A host of primaries were conducted on May 20, most of which were in states that do a poor job of electing women to political office: Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. Several of these states saw races with strong female candidates who will now progress to the general elections in November.

Recently I’ve read a number of articles highlighting how women have helped facilitate compromise and get legislation passed in this cantankerous and uncompromising 113th Congress. One in Time noted that, “with the exception of immigration reform, every major bill passed in this [2013] session [was] authored by a woman.” An article from Brookings quoted Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Mark Pryor (D-AR) as saying that “their female colleagues deserve most of the credit for driving the compromise to reopen the U.S. government.”