San Francisco Superior Court Judges. California is the only state that collects data on minority representation, women's representation, and LGBTQIA+ representation on the bench. Source: Superior Court of California

This post is part of the Balanced Bench project, our ongoing project about representation in the state judiciary. Read our first post about why diversity on the state bench matters here.

In 2016, Tracey E. George and Albert H. Yoon, in conjunction with the American Constitution Society, published a study titled “The Gavel Gap” that found that 69.8% of state judges were men and 80.4% were white. In order to get this data, George, Yoon, and a team of research assistants spent over a year combing through federal court websites, press releases, newspapers, and other resources to create a database of over 10,000 state judges’ biographies. Despite this extensive effort, the finished database is still incomplete. They were unable to find data on the race of about 5% of judges. This database also excludes the nearly 20,000 judges who sit on local and special jurisdiction courts. Furthermore, the database also only reflects the makeup of the bench in 2014; many judges have inevitably retired or been voted out of office in the past four years.

By Izzy Allum

With the 2018 midterm elections quickly approaching, American politics are once again in the spotlight. However, one area of American politics that has long being left in the shadows is the sovereign Native-American governments housed within our country. Native-American tribes, or “nations,” have separate, federally recognized governments, and they have the right to pass their own laws and run their own courts. For decades, the political representation of women and how to increase it has been extensively studied and discussed, but little research has been done on the representation of women in Native-American tribal governments. In an attempt to begin filling in this missing data, RepresentWomen has begun looking into the legislative and judicial branches of thirteen tribal governments.

The RepresentWomen interns spoke with Mayor of Oakland Libby Schaaf on Tuesday. Elizabeth “Libby” Schaaf was elected the Mayor of Oakland, California in 2014 in a ranked choice voting election. Schaaf was born and raised in Oakland and has long been involved in volunteerism in her community. She co-founded Oakland Cares, a non-profit dedicated to organizing volunteer and community projects. A Loyola Law School graduate, Schaaf worked as a legislative aid for former mayor Jerry Brown and served on the Oakland City Council. As mayor, Schaaf has focused on improving education, reducing homelessness, and improving community safety. In 2016, she launched the Oakland Promise, an education initiative aiming to triple the number of college graduates from Oakland by 2025.

#WomenToWatch is a series by RepresentWomen that documents rising women leaders and their stories.

Primary season resumes in early August, when voters in Tennessee, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, and Washington will pick their candidates for the 2018 midterm elections.

There are dozens of accomplished and passionate women running in these five states’ primaries, and it was difficult to choose just one woman to spotlight this week as part of #WomenToWatch. Brenda Jones, House candidate for Michigan’s 13th district, stands out because of her 13 years of service and leadership on Detroit’s City Council. Currently, Jones is serving her second term as the council’s president. She describes her Congressional platform as “JONES: Jobs, Opportunities, Neighborhoods, Education, and Safety”, and says these have been her priorities since her first term on the city council.

President Donald Trump just nominated Brett Kavanaugh to replace outgoing Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy.  Soon after, CNN ran an article citing a statistic that, if confirmed, Kavanaugh will be the 108th white man to serve on the Supreme Court (he would be only the 114th justice to ever serve). By contrast, the Census Bureau estimates that in 2017, only 30.8% of the U.S. population were white men. Several news outlets shared this statistic to emphasize the vast underrepresentation of people of color and women on the Supreme Court.

Georgia voters returned to the polls for a primary runoff election yesterday, following up on three races from the May primary in which no candidate garnered a majority of the vote.

Yesterday’s most high-profile contest was a two-man race for Republican gubernatorial nominee. Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State, beat opponent Casey Cagle by nearly 20 points. In November, Kemp will face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a state representative whose candidacy, if successful, would be historic:  Abrams would become Georgia’s first Black governor, Georgia’s first woman governor, and the first Black woman governor anywhere, ever.

Beth Harwell has shattered several glass ceilings in her lifetime. In 2001, she became the first-ever chairwoman of the Tennessee Republican Party. In 2011, after serving in the Tennessee House of Representatives for more than two decades, her colleagues chose her to become the first female speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives. On Thursday, August 2nd, she’s running in the Republican gubernatorial primary to become the first female major party nominee and the first female governor of Tennessee.

Every generation has had to wrestle with questions of identity, power and equality - within the family, within religious practice & belief, and within decision making bodies and society at large. Today, however, marks 170 years since the launch of the 'modern' movement for women's rights that brought Quaker, republican, abolitionists and others together to birth a campaign for suffrage and equality. I myself am descended from a long line of Quaker agitators and champions of equality and, lucky for me, I married a man who claims the same heritage. Our generation's call for equality & representation is enriched by those who toiled on those hot summer days in Seneca Falls, NY, 170 years ago.