Image source- Gavel Gap

While there has been much media coverage on gender disparity in the legislative branch, there is little attention being paid to the lack of representation of women and people of color in the judicial branch. Less than one-third of state judges are women, even while women make up more than one-half of the U.S. population. People of color make up about 40% of the population, but account for less than 20 percent of state judges. At the federal level, only 36 percent of United States trial court judges are women and only 10.5 percent of U.S. federal judges are women of color.

RepresentWomen was honored to recently welcome Rosana Schaack, member of the Liberian House of Representatives, to our offices. She shared her experiences working in a male-dominated government and the challenges she and other Liberian women face as they work towards gender parity in the legislature. In Liberia’s most recent election for the national legislature,  146 women ran  but just four women challengers won seats. Currently, there are only 11 female legislators out of 103 total in the Legislature of Liberia, with nine women in the House and two in the Senate.

 Virginia Democrat Jennifer Wexton, Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (left) and Sen. Tim Kaine(right) speaks at her 10th District primary night party in Sterling, Va., on Tuesday June 12th, 2018. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

By Kendrik Icenhour & Katie Pruitt

Women candidates won big on Tuesday June 12th, as Virginia, South Carolina, Maine, Nevada, and North Dakota held their primary elections for state and national offices.

Virginia continued the trend started in the state’s 2017 general election trend, where voters elected an historic number of women to the House of Delegates, by electing women in droves. On Tuesday night, six out of the 16 winners in congressional primaries were women (5 Democrats, 2 Republicans); in every district that a woman ran, a woman won.

My name is Evelien van Gelderen and I am a rising sophomore at Swarthmore College located in Swarthmore, Penn. Though I have yet to declare a major, I’m considering economics and biology. However, I’m also interested in policy and politics. My family has always been engaged in the news, and growing up, dinner conversation was often centered around social issues and recent news events.

In the eighth grade, my civics teacher tasked me with writing and delivering a speech on what my ideal American president would be like. Standing up in front of my class, I declared that my preferred president would be a woman. A male classmate criticized my speech because he believed that gender was irrelevant to whether someone can be an effective president. His comment upset me. Gender may not have been relevant to him but it sure was relevant to me. The state that I’m from, Virginia, has never elected a governor or a senator who was not a heterosexual man. Women are 51% of the U.S. population, yet they make up only 19.8% of Congress and 25% of state legislatures. Gender was important to me because I wanted a role model.

By RepresentWomen intern Lindsay Richwine

Four cities in the Bay Area—San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro—have made the switch to an electoral system called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV is a voting system that allows voters to rank candidates as their first, second, third choice and so on. If no candidate has a majority when votes are counted, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated, and ballots that have those candidates marked as their first choice are counted towards the candidate they selected as their second choice.

Last semester, one of my professors told me that political scientists have a bad habit of hypothesizing really broadly about the nature of our political systems and then hoping those theories “stick”. Though this feels overly simplistic, I am somehow completely on board with the theory that “descriptive representation” can help fix everything -- that is, electing representatives whose identities reflect the diverse identities of their constituents. Descriptive representation means women, LGBTQ folks, and people of color in office. It means we can look at our government and see ourselves represented there. It brings Washington D.C. closer to home. It means issues and policy needs that no committee of white men could have imagined are brought to the table. And it gives more people stake in the process, which is the most fundamental part of our participatory democracy.