As the summer solstice approaches, it’s time to reflect on how women’s voices and leadership are growing stronger, but we still have a long way to go. This week, we’ll lift up that evidence of progress and new research on the importance of women’s leadership, but also of the gaps that RepresentWomen is determined to help close. To watch an hour-long discussion of my thoughts on such issues, see this video of my presentation last week to the Council on Foreign Relations. Many thanks to Linda Robinson for the invitation! 

Celebrating Opal Lee & Juneteenth

Opal Lee in 2021 at age 94. Source: NPR

To succeed, we will all need the creativity and resilience of Opal Lee, who is turning 99 this year. June 19th marks our newest federal holiday, Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Here’s National Public Radio in 2021 on Lee’s central role:

At the age of 89, Lee decided her new life mission was much like that of Granger: "I knew I just had to spread the word about Juneteenth to everybody." The best way to do that, she figured, was to help get Juneteenth accepted as a national holiday.

She decided to start with a walking campaign in cities along a route from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C. It wasn't a straight line. Over several weeks, Lee arrived in cities where she'd been invited to speak and walked 2½ miles to symbolize the 2½ years that it took for enslaved people in Texas to learn they were free….

Since then, Lee has become known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth. Her annual walks culminated in a trip to the Capitol in September 2020, carrying a petition signed by 1½ million Americans urging Congress to pass legislation for a federal holiday. "It wasn't a success," she said about the trip. Undeterred, she returned again in February as a new version of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act was reintroduced…. Before the passage of the Juneteenth legislation by the House and Senate [in 2021], there have only been four new holidays added to the national calendar in the past 100 years.”

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, painted by Melanie Humble

This week's milestones include the birthdays of Venus Williams, former #1 tennis player; Sarah Stewart Holland, co-host of the Pantsuit Politics podcast; Michelle Ringuette, American Federation of Teachers; noted author Octavia Butler; Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless attorney Ann Marie Staudenmaier; Meryl Streep; and United States Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Our Elected Leaders Should Be Able to Serve Without Fear: The Minnesota Assassinations

Melissa Hortman with her children and husband, who was also assassinated. Source

When I talk with women elected to office at all levels of government, it is all too common to hear concerns about the levels of toxicity and threats of violence that they experience. The horrific political assassination on June 14th of Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota state legislator who had served as Speaker of the House from 2019 to 2025, is only the latest. This month also marks the 9th anniversary of the assassination of British Member of Parliament Jo Cox and more than 15 years since the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

There is no simple fix to this challenge, and we believe there should be a major push to provide greater support and security to candidates and elected officials. I wanted to lift up this important position from the Vote Mama Foundation led by the amazing Liuba Grechen Shirley:

Entering the political arena should never come at the expense of a candidate’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being. Unfortunately, women, especially women of color, face persistent harassment, threats, and abuse on the campaign trail that takes a toll on their mental health and can even drive them out of politics altogether. These are voices that we desperately need at the decision-making table and the persistent acts of violence and terror against them are pushing women out of office and out of power.

In January of 2024, the Brennan Center for Justice released “Intimidation of State and Local Officeholders,” a groundbreaking research report on the patterns and dynamics of abuse and violence experienced by state and local candidates across the country. Their report included the following statistics: 

• Women were three to four times as likely as men to experience abuse targeting their gender.
• Officeholders of color were more than three times as likely as white officeholders to experience abuse targeting their race.
• Larger shares of women and people of color serving in local elected offices experienced abuse related to their families—including their children—than did other officeholders.
• Women serving in state legislatures were nearly four times as likely as men to experience abuse of a sexual nature.

Solution: By replicating our Campaign Funds for Childcare model, we will continue to break down the barriers that keep women and families out of office and out of power. This common-sense solution is at no cost to taxpayers and is already allowed at the Federal level….Under federal guidelines, candidates for Federal office are allowed to use private campaign funds to pay for home security enhancements, “because the threats and need for security upgrades would not exist irrespective of the officeholders’ candidacy or duties as an officeholder.” /..Subsequently, states such as California, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Minnesota have all adopted similar guidelines to the Federal Election Commission rulings that allow state and local candidates to use campaign funds on security expenses in direct response to threats of violence against a candidate or officeholder. 

Women Win Big in Democratic Statewide Primaries in Virginia

Ghazala Hashmi declaring victory on election night. Source,

In the wake of Democrats nominating Mikie Sherrill for governor last week, now Democrats have nominated Abigail Spanberger and Republicans Winsome Earle-Sears in a contest that will make Virginia’s next governor the first woman to ever hold the office. Furthermore, Democrats also nominated state Senator Ghazala Hashmi in a hard-fought primary for Lt. Governor, who won with just 27% of the vote. Virginia currently ranks 28th in the nation according to our 2024 Gender Parity Index. RepresentWomen will be monitoring how the governor's race and the use of ranked-choice voting in areas like Charlottesville and Arlington may impact this ranking in the 2025 Gender Parity Index.

Margaret Brathel writes for NPR on the governor’s race:

The major-party candidates in the race for governor are already set; neither faced a serious primary challenge. The race pits Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who previously represented Virginia's 7th Congressional District on Capitol Hill, against Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, the current lieutenant governor.

The political landscape Spanberger and Earle-Sears will negotiate between now and November likely favors Democrats, but still offers opportunities for Republicans. Virginia shifted right in 2024, but Kamala Harris still won it by six points. That lean to the right was fueled in large part by Trump's gains in the suburbs outside of D.C. — an area of the state that now stands to be particularly affected by the Trump administration's cuts to the federal government. Whether Earle-Sears can consolidate those suburban inroads — or whether Spanberger can capitalize on anger over the Trump administration's antagonistic approach to the federal workforce — may very well decide the race.

The Associated Press covered Sen. Hashmi’s primary win:

The candidates for Virginia’s lieutenant governor are set to make history after Sen. Ghazala Hashmi won the Democratic nomination for the position on Wednesday. Hashmi is the first Muslim and the first Indian-American to be nominated to appear on the ballot for a Virginia statewide office. She defeated five other candidates, including Democrat Levar Stoney by less than a percentage point, to secure the nomination in a razor-thin primary race. Stoney congratulated Hashmi on Wednesday in a concession statement.

Hashmi will now face Republican John Reid, the first openly gay man to receive a major party’s endorsement for statewide office in Virginia, who became the de-facto nominee after his primary opponent left the race.

CAWP Analysis of Women in State Legislative Elections in New Jersey

The Center for American Women and Politics did a quick and helpful report on New Jersey’s assembly primaries earlier this month, in contests where parties can nominate up to two candidates in each of 40 districts. Here’s data from the CAWP report:

• Women Nominees in 2025: Based on primary election results, women are 55 of 154 (35.7%) major-party nominees already selected for state Assembly in New Jersey, including 34 of 79 (43.0%) Democrats and 21 of 75 (28.0%) Republicans. Two (2D) women candidates are in races that are too close to call.
• 27 (21D, 6R) women incumbents are nominees for re-election. Incumbent Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D) is the only woman incumbent who did not run for re-election.
• 25 (11D, 14R) women have won nominations to challenge incumbents in November. 3 (2D, 1R) women have won nominations for open-seat state Assembly contests.
• The number of women state Assembly nominees falls short of the record high (65), set in the 2021 election. This year, 15 (14D, 1R) women candidates for state Assembly were unsuccessful, including three incumbents (Garnet Hall-D, Barbara McCann Stamato-D, and Jessica Ramirez-D).
• Current/Historic Women’s Representation: Women currently hold 31 (25D, 6R) of 80 seats in the New Jersey State Assembly.

Yes, it Matters When Women Win and Serve!

Women's representation matters on multiple levels, but one is particularly important to me: women in office collectively are likely to govern differently and prioritize different issues, as RepresentWomen has found previously in New York City. Here are two valuable recent academic articles making this point.

• Understanding Female Legislators’ Substantive Representation in the Australian Parliament:  From the abstract: Female legislators are typically assumed to act for other women when policymaking. Contemporary literature challenges this, and a need to “tow the party line” complicates the process of attributing acts of substantive representation vis-à-vis policy to any individual political actor. Using 1,047 private member’s bills tabled in the Australian federal parliament (1995–2022), we address this limitation by employing a quantitative text analysis approach. We find gendered differences in the propensity to propose such bills across parties and over time. Further, our analysis reveals that substantive gender differences in legislation extend beyond linguistic variations to distinct thematic concerns. These findings underscore the role of gender but also other biographical and contextual factors in shaping legislative priorities.
• Empowering Change: Female Political Representation and Help-Seeking Behavior Among Women Victims of Violence, From the abstract. Using data from Italy’s largest network of anti-violence centers, this study investigates whether increased female representation in local politics affects the help-seeking behavior of women experiencing gender-based violence. Exploiting the implementation of gender quotas and the presence of staggered elections as a natural experiment, we adopt a shift-share instrumental variable strategy to address endogeneity concerns. We find that greater female political representation significantly increases the likelihood that women—particularly those who are younger or unemployed—seek support from anti-violence centers. This effect is more pronounced when considering municipalities with greater proximity to these centers and is observed exclusively among first-time users of these services, with no impact on recurrent cases.
  
  

The Global Gender Gap

G7 leaders at recent gathering, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is the group’s only woman - Source

Women’s under-representation in politics is enduring, but only part of a broader picture of general male dominance in nations around the world. See this new report from the World Economic Forum:

The Global Gender Gap Index annually benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions (subindexes): Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Since launching in 2006, it is the longest-standing index tracking the progress of numerous countries’ efforts towards closing these gaps over time….

Looking at the constant set of 145 economies included in both this year’s and last year’s editions, the global gender gap closed by +0.3 percentage points in 2025, from 68.4% in 2024 to 68.8% in 2025. When considering the constant set of 100 economies covered continuously since the 2006 edition, the gap has narrowed by 0.4 percentage points, from 68.6% in 2024 to 69.0% in 2025. Based on the collective speed of progress of those 100 economies, it will take 123 years to reach full parity globally. 

In addition, the 2025 Global Gender Gap Index shows that no economy has yet achieved full gender parity. Iceland (92.6%) continues to lead the Global Gender Gap Index, holding the top position for 16 consecutive years, and remains the only economy to have closed more than 90% of its gender gap since 2022.

Valuable New International Data on Women’s Representation in Politics

From the summary of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women’s Power Index

I was pleased to find these excellent sources of information on women’s representation released this month from the Council on Foreign Relations and the United Nations.

• Council on Foreign Relations’ Women’s Power Index: Created by CFR’s Women and Foreign Policy program, the Women’s Power Index ranks 193 UN member states on their progress toward gender parity in political participation. It analyzes the proportion of women who serve as heads of state or government, in cabinets, in national legislatures, as candidates for national legislatures, and in local government bodies, and visualizes the gender gap in political representation. Scroll down below the table to view a list of current female heads of state or government, learn why women's political representation matters, find additional resources on women's political participation, and read the methodology.
• United Nations’ Women’s leadership and political participation: Women’s equal participation and leadership in political and public life are essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. However, data show that women are underrepresented at all levels of decision-making worldwide and that achieving gender parity in political life is far off.
  • Women in executive government positions
  • Women in national parliaments
  • Women in local government
  • Expanding participation

More on women in executive positions from the UN report: 

• As of 1 June 2025, there are 27 countries where 31 women serve as Heads of State and/or Government. At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.
• Just 18 countries have a woman Head of State, and 20 countries have a woman Head of Government. 
• Data compiled by UN Women show that women represent 22.9 percent of Cabinet members heading Ministries, leading a policy area as of 1 January 2025. There are only nine countries in which women hold 50 per cent or more of the positions of Cabinet Ministers leading policy areas.
• The five most commonly held portfolios by women Cabinet Ministers are Women and gender equality, followed by Family and children affairs, Social inclusion and development, Social protection and social security, and Culture.

Happy summer solstice,

Cynthia Richie Terrell

P.S. 

Like many in the DC area, I was happy to retreat from the spectacle of a peace-time military parade on Donald Trump’s birthday that seemed to celebrate the often patriarchal view that “might makes right.” My husband and I spent a lovely weekend in a non-electrified cabin in the Pine Barrens that my Quaker grandparents, who served as the first staff of the American Friends Service Committee, built 100 years ago.

According to numerous news reports, millions of Americans around the country participated in “No Kings” rallies last weekend. This sign from Juneau, Alaska caught my eye.