More women politicians needed, opposing sides agree

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Updated: January 21, 2012 5:48PM

Politics, indeed, can make odd bed fellows.

Last week, an effort by a group called Political Parity that aims to get more women into politics featured both the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation and a group that has asked Congress to stop funding them.

Among the 50 members of Political Parity: Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Janice Crouse, a senior fellow with Concerned Women for America.

Launching more women into public office has united Political Parity members. “The trick is that we’re not supporting any specific candidates, we just want to see more women in office,” said Kerry Healey, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and a foreign policy adviser to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. “We want to know what we can do collectively to remove the impediments to women running for office.”

After several years of incremental increases in the number of women serving in office, their numbers leveled off a decade ago and dropped in 2010 for the first time in 30 years.

Only 17 percent of Congress is female, and women hold only six governorships.

“There is much more opportunity for newcomers” in 2012, said Mary Hughes of Palo Alto, Calif., founder of the 2012 Project, another such effort. “It’s much easier to win an open seat than to challenge and beat an incumbent.”

One reason that more women don’t run, says Hughes, is nobody asks them. Hughes and others point to studies that show women need to be asked several times by someone they trust before they will commit to running.

But “men wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, ‘I see a senator,’” said Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, CEO and president of the nonpartisan Women’s Campaign Forum. “A woman’s knee-jerk response is, ‘I’m not qualified.’

“The problem isn’t that women don’t win,” Bennett said. “It’s that women don’t run.”

Scripps Howard News Service