Dear Readers,
This week, the RepresentWomen team released a brief on electoral systems and outcomes for women in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The brief finds that the use of antiquated voting systems in Canada and the United States is a major barrier to women winning office, while the proportional voting system paired with well-enforced gender quotas in Mexico has had a huge impact on outcomes for women, who now hold 50% of seats in the Mexican Congress.
I wrote more about the electoral barriers women face in the United States in the introductory letter for the report: “The decline of women in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2024 elections indicates that current strategies alone are insufficient for building women’s political power and reaching gender balance in Congress and our highest executive offices. The fact that Mexico has reached gender balance after adopting gender quotas and a fairer voting system offers advocates for women’s representation in the United States a blueprint for parity that includes the adoption of electoral systems that create competition and open seats that enable more women to run and to win. Fairer voting systems that work in the American, candidate-based context include ranked choice voting (RCV) for single-winner seats and RCV in multi-winner districts – these reforms are the most promising and scalable strategy to reach gender balance in government in our lifetimes.”
RepresentWomen’s 4th Annual Democracy Solutions Summit
We are also gearing up for our 4th annual Democracy Solutions Summit, uplifting women experts to kick off Women’s History Month – use this link to register! Speakers this year include opening remarks for the Summit from Erin Vilardi, CEO of Vote Run Lead, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, NM Secretary of State, candidate for Georgia Governor Stacey Abrams, and RepresentWomen board member Rina Shah. All of the fabulous speakers can be found on the graphic above.
Each day of the Summit has a unique theme exploring policy solutions at the local, state, and federal levels to reform our democracy:
DAY ONE: March 4th from 3-5 pm — Laboratories of Democracy: Policy Solutions in Local Government:
- Local Office: A Pivotal Pathway to Power
- From Portland to Portland - Women Winning with RCV
- From New York City to Alaska: Building the Movement From the Ground Up
DAY TWO: March 5th from 3-5 pm — Effective State-Level Solutions:
- Preserving Democracy: State Voting Rights Acts
- Removing Barriers to State Legislative Office with Ranked Choice Voting
- Modernizing State Legislatures: Campaign Funds for Childcare, Security, and Legislative Pay
DAY THREE: March 6th from 3-5 pm — From Peak to Plateau: Building Women’s Political Power in Congress:
- Election Administration and Democracy
- Prioritizing Childcare & Paid Leave: The Path to a More Inclusive Democracy
- Breaking Barriers with Electoral Reform
- The Power of Bipartisanship
Female Body Politic Podcast
I so enjoyed my conversation with Lorissa Rinehart, author of a soon to be published book on Jeannette Rankin, on her podcast The Female Body Politic. It was a terrific opportunity to talk about the state of our democracy, the value of electing more women, the Quaker beliefs that ground my belief in equality, & the legacy of Jeannette Rankin who was the first woman elected to Congress in 1916!
Women Leaders to Celebrate This Week
Marian Anderson, painted by Melanie Humble
Women leaders to celebrate this week include WA state rep Liz Berry, Emerge president A’Shanti Gholar, African American opera singer Marian Anderson (whose concert my mother and her family attended at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1929), and U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan, who all have birthdays! And notable milestones include the anniversary of the swearing-in of Frances Perkins as the nation’s first woman cabinet secretary in 1933, the appointment of Loretta Lynch as U.S. Attorney General in 2015, and the release of Dr. Jennifer Piscopo’s book The Impact of Gender Quotas in 2012.
Governor and U.S. Senate Roundup
Peggy Flanagan, painted by Melanie Humble
New Jersey will have primaries for an open seat race for governor on June 10th. Even with a chance to elect only its second governor in history and first since Christie Todd Whitman in 1996, only one of ten announced major party candidates is a woman, Democratic congresswoman Mikie Sherrill. The six-candidate Democratic primary is a free-for-all, with Sherrill topping a fractured field with an average of 13% in January polling. Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop is running as a reformer, including lifting up ranked choice voting or such contests. The only other governor race this year is in Virginia, which is expected to have an historic all-women general election between former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D) and Lt. Governor Winsome Sears (R); Spanberger leads by six points in recent polling averages.
With Mitch McConnell's retirement after more than four decades in office, Kentucky voters next year will have a rare opportunity to elect their first woman Senator in history. One potential candidate is former UN Ambassador Kelly Craft, who was the only woman in a 12-candidate Republican primary for governor in 2023. In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz won’t run for the open seat being vacated by Senator Tina Smith, The Hill reports that women candidates may include Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan and Congresswomen Angie Craig and Ilhan Omar.
Women Lose Seats in German Elections, With Growing Gender Gap Between Left and Right
Markus Söder wrote on Instagram: ‘We’re ready for political change in Germany.’ Photograph: Markus Söder/Instagram
On February 22, Germany elected a new coalition government, almost certainly to be headed by Christian Democratic Party leader Friedric Merz, in coalition with the Social Democratic Party headed by outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz. Women lost ground in parliament, dropping from 35% to 32.4% in the wake of structural changes reducing women’s opportunities. A photo of Merz’s all-male negotiating team led to this coverage in the Guardian newspaper:
“The picture attracted a slew of derision. “Get us a coffee, won’t you, sweetie?” went an imaginary caption. “Did you hide the women under the table?” asked an Instagram user. “Where are the women, in the kitchen?” asked another. “There are more doors than women in this picture,” observed a third. The Greens co-leader Franziska Brantner remarked tartly: “The new Syrian government is probably more diverse than the Union’s negotiating team,” she told the news agency DPA. Her predecessor as party chief, Ricarda Lang, shared the picture, sarcastically echoing previous comments by Merz: “Quotas primarily hurt women themselves.” Others asked why the CSU’s Dorothee Bär, one of the few women deemed likely to join Merz’s cabinet, had not been included after winning an absolute majority in her constituency, the strongest result in the country.”
Elon Musk endorsed and heavily promoted the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party many associate with the nation’s Nazi past, and Vice President JD Vance recently met with the AfD’s leader while skipping a meeting with Sholz, but 79% of voters chose to support other parties in a high-turnout election where proportional representation greatly expanded the number of votes counting toward seats while making it far harder for an extreme power to earn the power to govern on its own. The Guardian’s five takeaways include: “A gender divide was also clearly visible, with women more likely to support left-leaning parties and men drawn to the right. The AfD, for example, won 24% of men but only 17% of women, while the SPD and the Linke claimed 18% and 11% of women’s votes respectively, compared with 15% and 7% of men’s.”
Canada Liberal Party Election with Ranked Choice Voting
With Justin Trudeau stepping down and Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Canada sparking a backlash against the previously favored Conservative Party leader, Canada’s upcoming general election is one to watch. The center-left Liberal Party has five candidates seeking to replace Trudeau, with ranked choice voting results to be announced on March 9th. Former Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland is among the favorites. All five national parties in Canada use RCV for their leadership elections. When announcing his resignation, Trudeau said his single biggest regret was not being able to bring RCV to general elections in Canada.
Democratic Governors Navigate Policy Disputes with Trump on Funding and Inclusion
Credit: Troy R. Bennett, Bangor Daily News
An Associated Press article by Joey Cappelletti highlights growing tensions between Democratic governors and President Donald Trump in his second term. Maine Gov. Janet Mills clashed with Trump over his executive order targeting trans athletes, which led to a federal investigation into Maine's education policies. Other Democratic governors, like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and New York’s Kathy Hochul, engaged with Trump on policy matters but maintained opposition on key issues.
Disagreement is a core element of a healthy democracy, and women in politics should not be threatened with investigations and negative consequences for dissenting against the president:
The Democrats who lead the nation’s most populous states were in Washington for a meeting of the National Governors Association, where they tried to strike a balance between their states’ needs and their feelings about Trump.
Whitmer, known for clashing with Trump during his first term over the federal COVID-19 response, campaigned vigorously against him in 2024 on behalf of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. Whitmer said she sat next to Trump at a White House dinner on Saturday night.
“I was the only Democrat at the table. I was a little surprised. I think everyone in the room was a little surprised, to be honest,” she said. “But I took the opportunity to talk a little bit about tariffs.”
Denmark’s Woman Prime Minister Mette Frederikson on Immigration
David Leonhardt, on February 25th, took a deep dive in The New York Times magazine into the leadership skills of Denmark’s woman prime minster Mette Frederiksen - with her success tied to a controversial position among progressives of taking a hard line on immigration. I share this excerpt not to endorse her position, but to show how women can make hard decisions as leaders:
“Since President Trump won re-election in November, Frederiksen has become a global symbol of opposition to him, thanks to her rebuffing his call for Denmark to turn over control of Greenland. But the main significance of Frederiksen and her party, the Social Democrats, has little to do with aid to Ukraine or a territorial argument in the North Atlantic. Over the past six years, they have been winning elections and notching policy victories that would be the envy of liberals worldwide, and doing so at a moment when the rest of the West is lurching to the right…
To Frederiksen and her aides, however, a tough immigration policy is not a violation of progressivism; to the contrary, they see the two as intertwined. As I sat in her bright, modern office, which looks out on centuries-old Copenhagen buildings, she described the issue as the main reason that her party returned to power and has remained in office even as the left has flailed elsewhere. Leftist politics depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation, she explained. Otherwise, they will not accept the high taxes that pay for a strong welfare state. “Being a traditional Social Democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” Frederiksen says. Otherwise, “it’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society, as we are.” High levels of immigration can undermine this cohesion, she says, while imposing burdens on the working class that more affluent voters largely escape, such as strained benefit programs, crowded schools and increased competition for housing and blue-collar jobs. Working-class families know this from experience. Affluent leftists pretend otherwise and then lecture less privileged voters about their supposed intolerance.”
Recent Attempts to Reform Language in State Constitutions Have Failed
Photo Credit: Jack Dura/AP Photo, File
As of 2023, 41 state constitutions nationwide use exclusively male pronouns to reference an individual seeking or holding elected office; only nine use gender-neutral or a mix of male and female pronouns to refer to elected officials. In most cases, adapting gender-neutral language in government documents requires either legislative approval, a new constitutional amendment, or both. As recently as 2024, former Republican governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem pushed for a ballot measure to change the gendered state constitution from “he” to more neutral words like “the Governor.” This proposal failed in the South Dakota legislature due in part to the use of the word “pronoun” in the bill text- a symptom of the rise in conservative movements stripping trans and nonbinary individuals of their gender identity in government documents. Governor Noem limited gender-affirming care for kids and banned transgender women from playing in sports leagues that match their gender identity in 2023 and 2022, respectively. South Dakota scored a C and ranked 24th in our 2024 Gender Parity Index.
Sejal Govindaro of the Associated Press writes:
Across the nation, state constitutions presume officeholders are male, and they increasingly are outdated. This year, a record of 13 women were serving as governor before Noem stepped down to serve in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. In state legislatures, 2,469 women are serving, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Most states haven’t modernized their constitutions to reflect the rise of women in politics. Among those that have are New York’s, which became gender-neutral in 2001, and Vermont’s, where voters approved a change from “men” to “persons” in 1994.
Hollywood Sees Gender Parity in 2024’s Highest-Grossing Films
In addition to using innovative voting systems like ranked choice voting by the Academy, Hollywood once again leads the charge for representation. In 2024, for the first time in recent history, the percentage of top-grossing films featuring female protagonists equaled that of films with male protagonists, marking a major milestone for gender parity in Hollywood.
See what it's like to vote as an Academy member and rank the 2025 best-picture nominees!
Jake Coyle writes for ABC News:
Movies like “Wicked,"“Inside Out 2" and “The Substance” lifted Hollywood's theatrical releases to gender parity in leading roles in 2024. Of the 100 top domestic grossing films in 2024, 42% had female protagonists, and 42% had male protagonists, according to a report issued by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which also released its annual study Tuesday, found that 54% of the top 100 films at the box office in 2024 featured girls and women as protagonists. That's a massive jump from just the year prior, when 30% of films featured women in lead roles. In 2007, when the USC annual study began, that figure was just 20%.
"This is the first time we can say that gender equality has been reached in top-grossing films,” Stacy L. Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, said in a statement.
Ranked Choice Voting: Support in Arlington, 2025 Elections and New Resource
Women have a remarkable record of success in ranked choice voting (RCV) elections that invite voters to engage with more candidates. The county board in Arlington (VA) last winter unanimously voted to make RCV their permanent system for primary elections, and last week, after a pilot election in November, voted to keep using RCV in general elections:
“Board member Susan Cunningham was also encouraged by reporting from the County Registrar on her staff's experience working with voters during last fall's election. "I would say 1 in 100 [voters] would stop and ask us for more of an explanation with ranked choice voting," said Registrar Gretchen Reinemeyer. "Those who did need extra assistance with ranked choice voting needed assistance with the whole ballot. It was not just confusion limited to the office using ranked choice voting."
FairVote has released a new report on the many 2025 elections with ranked choice voting unfolding across the year, starting with Redondo Beach (CA) on March 4th. Highlights:
- RCV will be used in the largest cities in five states – including New York City and Minneapolis.
- RCV will be used for the first time in at least three cities: Charlottesville, VA; Fort Collins, CO; and Redondo Beach.
- RCV will be used in a special election to choose the next mayor of Oakland, CA.
- Skokie, IL will vote on an April ballot measure to adopt RCV.
- Big cities like Boston and Denver are taking steps toward the reform.
New Paper on Voting Systems
For those wanting a deeper dive into choices to make about approaches to RCV, see a new paper available as a free download on SSRN by FairVote’s Rachel Hutchinson and Michael Parson on Reform for Realists: The False Promise of Condorcet Voting. From the Abstract: “In this Article, we step back from the theoretical conversations about formal, mathematical election-system criteria that have dominated the discourse and offer a more functional framework for analyzing proposed reforms. This “reform for realists” approach seeks to situate the existing literature in a richer scholarly context, to surface and center key normative questions, and to ground future study in a thicker (albeit messier) account of mediated, pluralistic politics and competing reform options. Through this wider lens, we evaluate the latest CCM literature and argue that much of it misses the forest for the trees, ignoring fundamental principles of democratic design and first-order questions at the foundation of election law.
Conversation with RepresentWomen Board Chair & Women Leaders on the Value of Ranked Choice Voting
Register here for a virtual conversation on Monday, March 3rd at 7pm EST with RepresentWomen board chair Michelle Whittaker, my mayor (😊) Talisha Searcy, and Montgomery County, MD council member Laurie-Anne Sayles on work to expand the use of ranked choice voting in Maryland – see RCV Maryland for more information & a link to donate.
That's all for this week, enjoy your weekend!
Cynthia Richie Terrell
P.S.
Two Plays Capture What Life is Like for Women in America
I’ve been fortunate to see many plays with my theatre-loving husband and children. I visited Maryland’s Roundhouse Theatre twice to see the remarkable What the Constitution Means to Me, and was thrilled to learn that Heidi Schreck’s masterwork has become the most produced play in America. American Theatre wrote about the play early on in its run:
“What the Constitution Means to Me is partly playwright/performer Schreck’s revisiting her 15-year-old self, when she gave speeches around the country at American Legion halls about the Constitution, and took home prize money that paid for her entire college education. But in addition to giving us some of the exact speech she gave at 15, Schreck also gives us a dissection of the Constitution as she understands it now, as a forty-something-year-old woman. … What she discovered in the 10 years she spent working on the show, and in reflecting on her own life and those of the women in her family, a number of whom were abused, is that for all the progress the Constitution has made possible—the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, for instance, which has enabled the Civil Rights movement, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and workplace rights for women—the document has overall fallen short in protecting women from violence. Women and marginalized bodies are left out of the Constitution, and that “equal protection” has only been won in some cases by acts of judicial interpretation.”
This week, I saw the world premiere of Bess Wohl’s Liberation at Roundabout Theater on Broadway. This New York Stage Review article captures the frustration that I felt during the performance from listening to the repeating cycle of patriarchal norms in the United States: “If you were a woman in 1970, by almost every standard, you were regarded as a second class citizen in this country. You could not get a credit card or mortgage without a responsible man to co-sign for you. Abortion was illegal across the land; no matter your education or experience, you had fewer opportunities and were likely to earn less than your male counterparts; and despite all your protests and your dogged determination to gain equal rights, true equality eluded you. That’s the backdrop for Bess Wohl’s beautifully evocative play entitled Liberation. And given recent setbacks for women in the political landscape, this timely work resonates in a deeply personal way.”