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November 13, 2002

People, Get Ready

from Tuesday’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Women, get angry
Joan Ryan
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

I came across a photo spread last week of the 16 people who likely will head up the Senate’s major committees when the Republicans take control of the 108th Congress.

Only one of the 16 wore lipstick.

This could strike a female American citizen as monumentally depressing. It’s 2002. Women represent 51 percent of the population. We run Fortune 500 companies, repair space stations, transplant hearts. And still men get 15 committees in the most powerful legislative body in the land, and we get one.

But this is what’s really depressing:

The one female committee chair would represent a 100 percent increase over the number of female committee chairs in the Senate now (which is zero). (The chairmanships are based on seniority, so don’t look for much improvement any time soon.)

It’s been 10 years since the much-heralded Year of the Woman, when 24 women were elected to Congress, nearly doubling the female population on Capitol Hill. There are now 72 women in Congress, an improvement in membership that still accounts for less than 14 percent of the House and 13 percent of the Senate. To gain some perspective, these percentages rank the United States as 52nd in the world in terms of female representation in national legislatures (tied with Slovakia).

Among mayors of the top 100 cities, only 15 percent are women. When last week’s winning candidates are installed, California will have no women in any statewide constitutional office.

Countries that are, supposedly, less progressive than the United States already have had women presidents. We can’t get a woman nominated. My goodness,
we still run polls asking if America is “ready” for a female president, as if it were a radical notion.

Yes, the past week brought some good news. Ten women ran robust campaigns for governorships. Four won, raising the number of female governors in the United States to six, the most ever. And San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi is likely this week to become House minority leader, the highest congressional position a woman has ever held.

“The whole story of women in American politics over the last 30 years has been slow, steady progress,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “It’s not about overnight transformation.”

Yet, when I look at the slowly rising number of women in Congress, I still feel as if I’ve walked into a party and, expecting to see more familiar faces, wondered, “Where is everybody?”

Perhaps the biggest problem in getting more women in office is that too many women don’t see it as a problem. Or maybe they are simply willing to be more patient than I am. I get angry when I look at the numbers of women in high office. I want others to be angry, too. Anger fuels action. It’s an essential precondition for change.

Our anger will make us relentless in recruiting women to run for office, in pressuring our political parties to reach out to potential female candidates.

Women have many friends among the men in Congress and in statehouses across the country. They champion issues that are important to us. But our government can never be truly representative of the female half of the population as long as nearly all of the decision-makers have never been working mothers, choosing between decent child care and decent housing, never whacked their heads on a glass ceiling, never sat in a bathroom staring at a positive pregnancy test.

In the world of politics, we are still outsiders, and the status quo protects itself against outsiders. It will take angry, activist women working together to achieve real representation. In order to lead the country, we first have to lead ourselves.

E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 19

Posted by pogo at November 13, 2002 9:08 AM