Hello, and welcome back to
the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss and
compare democratic institutions. For hundreds of years, all laws were written
only by men. All governments, parliaments, and courts were captured by men. In most
countries, representation of women is still far from being representative of the population
as a whole. In the US , women occupy only 24% of seats in the U.S. Senate, and 28% of seats
in the U.S. House of Representatives. Only 18% of govern
ors are women, and there has never
been a female US president as we all know. With Cynthia Richie Terrell I discuss the
representation of women in US politics. She is the Executive Director and Founder
of RepresentWomen, an organization that pushes for parity of women in US politics. The
organization started as Representation2020, a program of the non-partisan reform group
FairVote, that worked to build a solid intellectual foundation from which future
work on representation of women could
grow. I really enjoyed this discussion
with Cynthia that touches on many different aspects of electoral systems,
the role of women in politics and society, and the strategies that RepresentWomen adopted to
push to improve womens’ political power in the US. This conversation is also an attempt to bring
in more voices from organizations that are being active to make countries more democratic.
Conversations like this are hopefully useful for listeners who themselves are actively promoting
el
ectoral reforms or other institutional changes. Cynthia Richie Terrell is a founding
member of the ReflectUs coalition, and an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms
to advance women’s representation and leadership. Cynthia and her husband Rob Richie helped to
found FairVote – a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters
greater choice, a stronger voice, and more representative democracy.
In 2020 Cynthia was named a Brewer Fellow and she has been published in numerous
print journals including the Washington Post, The New York Times. She graduated with a B.A. in
political science from Swarthmore College in 1986. Please also follow her on Twitter @CynthiaRTerrel. I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this
is the twenty-eighth episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political
economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And
I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science
and the Ce
nter for Global Development. You find a full transcript of this episode on
my website rulesofthegame.blog. I am always curious to hear your opinion, so just send
me an email to stephan.kyburz@gmail.com, and please leave a review and share this
episode with friends and colleagues. Cynthia Richie Terrell, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. I’m very
glad to have you on the show. Thank you very much. My first question, as always, is what is your first memory of
democracy or of politics i
n general? One of my very first memories, I’m not sure
it’s the exact first, was the presidential election in 1972. I grew up in a small college
town. My father was a professor. My mother was active in the league and voters and George
McGovern was running against Richard Nixon and my mother was involved in going door to
door trying to convince people to vote for George McGovern that year. My brother was working
on George McGovern’s campaign in New York city. I felt like I was understanding
that there
were important policy discussions that were being discussed and it was an exciting time and
my father um showed me a can of soda which I didn’t grow up normally drinking soda at all,
but he showed me this can of soda and he said if the Democrat, if George McGovern Wins you can
have this can of soda tomorrow morning which is a completely weird thing for my father to
say out of character for him. But I think it was an indication of how much he supported
George McGovern and how inv
olved we’d all been. And he was going to wake me up when the final
election returns came but I remember waking up in the morning realizing that my father,
neither my father nor my mother had woken me up to tell me that George McGovern had won and
that Nixon had won and I remember that feeling of feeling depleted and let down that my candidate
didn’t win. I was eight years old at the time. Was this like a wake up call in
terms of political awareness? I suppose so, yes. It was during the Viet
nam
war, my brothers were older than… they still are older than I am, ten and twelve years older,
so there was a draft going on and while my family was Quaker and my brothers were conscientious
objectors, I very much felt the presence of the… of war in another country that was during
the years when war coverage was different in the United States. Walter Cronkite
came on the news every night at 11 and showed the number of soldiers who
had died. And it felt very vivid to my 8 year old self a
nd I felt like there
was a lot on the line in that election. That’s very interesting. Thanks
for sharing these memories. So today I’d like to talk about the organization
you are the CEO of and that you also founded, which is called RepresentWomen and this
organization is pushing for the representation but also for the leadership of women in US politics.
Maybe can you briefly give an overview of what the organization is all about and what are
your key goals with this organization? and also
maybe how it was created? Where did it come
from? What are the origins of the organization? Yes, sure. The organization that I founded,
RepresentWomen, started out as a project of FairVote, the Nonpartisan Electoral
Reform Think and Action Tank’ and we started out looking at women’s international
representation and the impact of various voting systems on outcomes for women around the globe.
Partly because FairVote was really and still is really interested in understanding how different
vot
ing systems impact different constituency groups as part of its mission to advance fair
voting systems in the United States and so we looked at women’s representation around the world.
And then we also began looking at each state. We created something called a Gender Parity Index
which measures women’s representation at the local state and federal level. But we realized
as the conversations evolved about the strategies that were helping more women get elected around
the world that they went
beyond elections and voting systems, even though that’s still a core
part of the mission and strategy. So in 2018 we broke off or became independent from FairVote.
We got our status from the IRS and we became our own nonpartisan nonprofit that really is
focused on looking at the structural barriers that women face both as candidates and as elected
officials in politics. And then the institutional reforms to level the playing field and create
more opportunities for women in politics. Really
at every level of government, in elected and
appointed office and in all three branches of government. There’s a lot of focus on tracking
women’s representation in legislative offices, in congress and in state legislatures.
Very little attention paid to women’s representation in the judiciary and of
course we have the executive branch in the United States as well. So that’s our mission,
to understand the barriers women face and the best practices to advance women’s representation and
lead
ership across all 3 branches of government. In elected and appointed office at every
level of government in the United States. I think that this descriptive representation,
right? — How many women are in different offices? How well women are represented
is just so important in terms of: Who is actually writing laws? Who is creating laws?
Who is applying the law essentially? — And I think that descriptive representation is still…
I mean it should be… In my view it should be even more discuss
ed. Because even if you have a
woman representing you know, women at large it might still be a different kind of Income. So
a lot of congress women are quite wealthy. So the question is always like how well do people
really represent, that are in Congress? So is descriptive representation something that you are
often discussing or try to use as an argument for improving representation of women in parliaments?
Or in all these institutions that you mentioned? Yes, for sure. I would say we tal
k a lot about
descriptive representation and substantive representation. And so there are two different
concepts there. I think at a very surface level, John Adams, one of the key quote-unquote founders
of American democracy, talked a lot about this idea of congress being a portrait of the people
in miniature and his wife of course, Abigail Adams was a big proponent of women’s rights and women’s
equality. Who knows whether he really thought that women should be part of that portrait. But I
think there was a general sense that democracy in the United States is founded on the idea or the
ideal that everybody has a voice in government. And of course the definition of that has grown,
has expanded as we’ve expanded the franchise. Black men got the right to vote in 1870 and then
mostly white women got the right to vote and run for office in 1920, we had the voting rights act
which even further expanded who’s enfranchised, who gets to vote. And obviously connected to that
is who ca
n run for office. So I think that it’s incredibly important in 2022 that we have all
decision making bodies reflecting the perspectives and lived experiences of everybody in the country.
And of course we can’t all be sitting in the halls of congress, that would be… have to be a very
large building but I think what we do require is a whole range of perspectives in decision making.
And that includes, as you mentioned, lower income people. It includes disabled people. It includes
LGBTQ people.
It includes moderate republicans. It includes conservative Democrats. It includes
women. Women of course are not a monolith, women are a span of the spectrum. Women are the
one majority. So if we believe in majority rule, in the United States and around the world,
then we’ve got a little bit of work to do for that. But I think that the idea of descriptive
representation will accelerate the progress toward the kind of decision making where everyone feels
like their voice is heard, where peo
ple are more likely to turn out and vote if they feel like
there’s somebody who looks and talks and thinks like them in the legislative body. People are more
likely to respect the governmental institutions. Of course in the United States right now, respect
for congress, for the supreme court, for the key institutions that are core to our functioning as
a society, people’s estimation of those bodies is very low and I think that’s a direct consequence
of people not seeing themselves in those
elected bodies and seeing a lot of, frankly, wealthy
white men who don’t speak for the majority. So that’s I think one part of the conversation. And
then there’s I think the important part of the conversation about what it means substantively to
have more voices at the decision making table. And I think it means delivering legislative packages
and policies that reflect the interests of the majority of the people. So in the United States
context we see the data and the polling on a range of
things from reproductive rights, to support for
paid leave, to support for gun safety measures. The majority of people support action on climate
that involves a lot of different kinds of policies. But we keep electing people who deliver
policies that don’t reflect the majority will. And it’s not like every woman is going to
support every one of those policies. No more than every man. Of course partisanship
really factors into the American political experience. But I think we need to
really
pay attention to the rules that govern outcomes and if we want different
outcomes then we’ve got to change the rules. I totally agree with that. It really matters
who is sitting in congress, right? Or who is sitting in our parliaments and how they think
about problems and how they see problems, whether they even recognize problems. Even
though, you know, people from the population might try to carry issues to them for them to
lobby in a certain way to change legislation but in the end if t
he people in parliaments
have a certain view on life or on issues or also are heavily influenced by lobbyists (and
we may talk about this a bit later) this creates legislation that is not in favor of the people
right? And that’s I think still a big issue. Even in countries that have more proportional
systems where you know the share of women for example has increased more substantially
but it is still a big issue in my view. Yes I agree. And I think we need to look
carefully, perhaps we ca
n talk a little bit more about this, the fact that because
we elect members of congress in single winner districts with winner take all voting,
there’s actually no built-in incentive for them to work together on behalf of their
constituents or to find compromise as a value added for them. Most of the time, it’s
seen as a liability. So we have brave (well, I’m revealing my partisanship here) We have
brave republicans who cross the line but pretty much they’re all retired now that they’ve
ei
ther voted for impeachment or something. You know there’s not a… it’s not tenable in the
United States right now, with a few exceptions, to really break out of that mold. And so
I think one of our biggest challenges and biggest opportunities is to change the voting
system to provide incentives for members of congress to work together to seek compromises. And
I’ve read polls from Pew Research Center and lots of other institutions that show that that’s what
Americans want. And so we deserve t
o have elected officials who recognize that and operate on that
basis. But to get those elected officials we do need different voting systems. It’s unrealistic to
think somehow that individual members of congress are going to start behaving differently because it
would be political suicide for us to expect them to just go hard on something right now without
any expectation that others would join them. Yeah. So these are really systems right? The
systems were created, they work in a certain
way and we can’t expect a system to completely
change without having changes in the rules. So as you mentioned, I mean you’re working on
several fronts. One is electoral reform, others is like to make more women run for office.
You talk about leadership. So how important do you think is electoral reform and where do you see
that movement currently in the US? And also your organization RepresentWomen is kind of a spinoff
from FairVote right? So do you think the dynamic is there to bring abou
t that change or is it in
what state is that discussion on that movement? I think that there is a lot of interest in the
United States in change. I’m not sure that there is a lot of alignment right now on how to get
to the change that people want. Partly because people I think aren’t very tuned in to the
rules of the game, so it’s hard to know what lever impacts what outcome. I think people, and
this is understandable, aren’t necessarily all constitutional lawyers. They’re not sure what
is
required to make a constitutional change. Or, you know, for example there’s interesting work
that my husband’s organization FairVote and the National Popular Vote have been working on now
for a few decades to make sure that the winner of the electoral college also is the winner of the
national popular vote. That actually, the strategy that they’re employing, which is an interstate
compact strategy, doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, which is the beauty of it. It can
be done by sta
tes. That’s what an interstate compact agreement among states is and that
actually is a very feasible and doable solution. Similarly changing the way we elect members of
the house, there’s nothing in the constitution that has to be changed. The constitution states
members of the house should be elected every two years. It doesn’t say with what kind of voting
system or on paper or on an Iphone or whatever. And even the difference between single seat or
multi-seat districts is not in the cons
titution. Correct and in fact in the United States most
house members were elected in multi-seat districts up until 1843 and then there was an expectation
of single member districts and then drifted away from that. And it wasn’t until 1967, as a
result of the voting rights act, which of course corrected for another important deficiency in our
system which was winner take all districts being used to… Excuse me. Multi-seat districts with
winner take all voting, really being employed to disenf
ranchise black voters and black candidates
in the south. And so it made sense then to impose the single winner district statute, but it’s just
a statute and that can be undone by congress just as easily as it was done. And I think that the
next step then, in the evolution, a modernization of politics in the United States would be to
adopt fair representation voting which is a combination of ranked choice voting which we know
works because the data tells us so and multi-seat districts which
we also know work. Getting
back to the thread of women’s representation, there are ten states that use multi-seat districts
right now. Three of those states Maryland, West Virginia and New Hampshire elect three to
five or more representatives or delegates per district. Though in Maryland just where I am
sitting right now, women are twice as likely to get elected from the multi-seat districts used
in Maryland than the single member districts used in Maryland and there are some different reas
ons
for that. But the data is really encouraging. But the concept of the fair representation act
which has been introduced in congress and signed onto by Don Beyer from Virginia and Jamie
Raskin from Maryland and Ro Khanna and a number of other members of congress, is that we combine
districts and states to make geographically larger districts that elect multiple representatives.
In a state like Georgia, for example, you’d have five member districts and you would automatically
eliminate ge
rrymandering which is a huge thing. Everybody hates gerrymandering. I’m not quite sure
everybody knows what it is but in one fell swoop, eliminate gerrymandering. People who draw the
districts would no longer determine the outcomes because the districts would be a whole state in
some cases. Or in other cases a state would have several multiseat districts or many in the case
of Texas or New York or California. In that five seat district, it would take about 17% or 18% of
the vote to win a se
at. So all of a sudden you see pretty accurate partisan representation occurring.
You’d have southern democrats getting elected in states where they’re really shut out now. You’d
have moderate republicans in urban areas like New York. You’d have probably 40% more women getting
elected. You’d have multiple constituencies of color having the power to elect candidates of
choice. Right now, the way, you know, the fragile voting rights act is working which has really
been stripped of its power i
s in a single winner district. It really depends on what the majority
of the population is. But, you know, let’s say latinos edge out african americans in a state
like Georgia. It’s really not fair to say – Okay african americans, you’re not going to have
representation if you want to elect an african american as your candidate of choice because
Latinos have just edge you out. In a five member district you can have a latino representative,
have the power to elect a latino and an african ame
rican and an asian american potentially. So
we see that as being transformative, both in the descriptive representation that we were talking
about earlier in the conversation but also, I think, in the fact that those members of congress
then work together and they have an incentive to work together on behalf of their constituents
and they’re not worried about the outcome and the vote total and so forth. They’re not going to be
penalized if they reach across to their colleague because those
colleagues are all representing
the same constituents. And I think that’s incredibly transformative and incredibly doable
and we see models for it. The senate in Australia uses the same system. Ireland uses the same
system. And it seems to be working really well and I think it really matches the political
psychology of American voters who like to vote for candidates probably over parties at this point
and it would free voters to be able to do that. I agree that the most important point,
I
think, in electoral reform would be to move to multi-member districts
and proportional representation, right? And then you have still a choice whether
you’d rather have a rank choice voting or a proportional electoral system. And both would
tremendously improve that representation. And what I think in the US is still interesting, that,
you know, rank choice voting is now promoted for single seat districts but also for multi-seat
districts. And sometimes it seems confusing, right? With your
organization do you try to push
more for the term proportional representation or is it, like… I know ranked choice voting is more
resonating with people, right? In the US it seems. Yes I think that the term proportional
representation doesn’t have much salience yet. That’s not to say that it won’t but I
think that it’s not very well understood. Lani Guinier who was appointed to be
an attorney general for civil rights by Bill Clinton had some thoughts about proportional
representation which
got her nomination withdrawn Yeah I know that story. And I think people are still stinging from
that. Of course proportional representation is used in other contexts and there may
be some parallels there that we can use in other industries and other sectors. And that
could be useful. I think part of the challenge is that the United States is a big country, there
are fifty states, we have territories (I’m ashamed to say) and there are a lot of different systems
and rules you use. Some state
s for example, have runoffs and so they’re calling this system instant
runoff. Really has a lot of… It resonates well because people understand what a runoff is but
there are other states that don’t use runoffs so you can’t really use that term. So I think some of
the differences in how we talk about the reforms come out of the fact that there are so many
different contexts in each state and in each jurisdiction and people have different names
for their local representatives. Some places th
ey’re called county council members. Other
places they’re called aldermen. Other places they’re called supervisors. And so it’s more
complicated, I think, to try to name things than one might think. If you’re outside of the United
States but for us, I think, at RepresentWomen… Well let me backup for a second
to say I think that there’s an unfortunate refrain that I hear from some
international circles that ranked choice voting is not a very powerful or transformative tool because
it doesn’
t… It’s not proportional. But there are a lot of races that are single winner races, single
candidate races. Mayor, governor, president. And it’s very transformational in those settings.
Whether you look at the presidential election in the United States in the year 2000 when it is
certain, I am certain that Ralph Nader voters would have cast a second place vote for Al Gore
and Al Gore would have definitely been elected president. That would have been… That would have
altered the way we are
experiencing climate change now. It would have altered the… It would have
saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis we went to war with soon after
that. And not to overplay the impact of rank choice voting for single winner elections. But it
is significant. And I think it’s a mistake that I hear some reformers making right now saying
– Oh, RCV, single winner RCV doesn’t really matter. I think that’s really unfortunate
because it undermines the serious problems that we’
ve had with split votes in single winner
races. The other reason that I’m really keen on level setting in this conversation around single
winner ranked choice voting is that it is having a profound impact on the outcomes for women. In city
council races, in places like New York and in Utah and the governor of Maine is a woman. All kinds
of evidence that we see that women are winning on average 51% of the seats, the city council seats
in jurisdictions with rank choice voting. And that is sig
nificant. Those are single winner council
seats but that’s 20% higher than the norm in non ranked choice voting jurisdictions and you can’t
beat 51% for matching the percentage of women in the population in those communities. And so we
also see more people of color and younger people and lower income people. Particularly, say in
New York City getting elected to the council, women now hold 61% of seats on the New York city
council as a result I think of the package of public financing and ra
nk choice voting and open
seats. And a terrific group called ‘21 for ‘21 that really worked with women to make sure they
were running for those seats. So that’s all a long preamble to say yes, we think that the
gold standard in the United States should be multi-winner ranked choice voting or proportional
ranked choice voting. But rank choice voting for those single winner seats that are always going
to be just held by one person is also essential. I totally agree it always matters what
off
ice we are talking about. And often people talk about elections to congress where
single winner districts rank choice voting, in my view, would be less transformative than a
multi-seat version of that. But obviously if you have single seat offices like city council
or specific executive positions I think, still, that ranked choice voting in
these single seat versions can make a huge difference. And especially make the
whole competition fairer. And I think that message still needs to go thro
ugh, right? But
obviously it matters what we’re talking about. One of those things that we don’t talk enough
about is the problem of plurality winners because of split votes. And we see that happening in the
primaries this year. FairVote did a great report on all of the winners quote-unquote who have won
their primary with a plurality. Some in large candidate fields. People are quote-unquote winning
with 25% of the vote or 30% of the vote and that doesn’t align with this ideal of majority r
ule
in the United States and that candidates should reflect the majority of voters. So I think
the costs of our current winner-take-all system that yields split votes in so many of
these primary races is really important to calculate. And I think the way that it relates to
the representation of women and people of color, other newcomers to politics it’s often people
who aren’t in power who are running for that seat and so multiple women or multiple people
of color might run for an office…
Traditionally gatekeepers and party leaders have told women or
people of color – Wait your turn. There’s already another black person in this race. You can’t run
because you’ll split the vote. Or they’ve said that to women. And that’s an ongoing problem where
three or four women might split the vote and the traditional status-quo candidate ends up winning.
That was one of the nice outcomes that we saw in New York City is, multiple women were running for
city council seats and endorsing, org
anizations actually endorsed multiple candidates showing the
power of the different system and that was great. I mean for a labor union or an environmental
organization to say – Yeah, we support three of these women and they’re all great – That
changes the process of the campaign, I think, in important ways. It means that those candidates
can campaign with one another to say – Here’s where we share common ground. Here’s where we
depart. But, you know, vote for me. 1,2,3 or my fellow candida
te 2,1,3 or whatever it is. But it
really does change the process and the outcome. You refer to another issue
that is like party rules, right? How parties are organized and how
easily you know women candidates can rise within the party hierarchy and can run and
also win elections. So in terms of party rules where do you focus on or what are your
strategies to have influence on those rules? Well, we know from our extensive international
research that gender quotas are the single most effect
ive way to advance women’s representation
around the globe. And of the top 50 countries for women’s representation, I think 90% of them have
some type of a gender quota. And it could be a legislative quota. It could be a party quota.
It could be a constitutionally mandated quota. So that conversation about intentionality that
gets us back to that descriptive representation question, it’s like affirmative action; If you
want to have academia be more diverse you’ve got to be intentional about
it. It’s not going to just
happen by chance. People in power, as Frederick Douglass said, you know, power concedes nothing
without a demand. You have to set up the system and the rule to demand the change in power. So
we know gender quotas are the most effective tool to advance women’s representation. In the
United States we actually use gender quotas. 100% of democratic parties use them for local
level offices. Men and women run for seats. Now there’s been, because of Tom Perez’s leadersh
ip
at the DNC, there’s now language that says that nonbinary people have an option to run as well
for those local level seats. And so that’s a really… A key entry point for a lot of women
in politics in the United States. And we see that with convention delegates as well. Both the
Democratic and the Republican party have mandated, really, that men and women have equal numbers
of seats. 100% of the democratic party and maybe 40% of republican parties do that for convention
delegates. But I
think that what that tells us is that it’s not impossible to expect, in the United
States, that we recognize the importance of that. You know there’s a rule that I like to talk about
called the Rooney Rule in professional football, whereby the rule is that you have to hire…
you have to interview more than one black coach when a coach is being hired. And it’s
that same concept of being intentional about who’s being considered for a position. The way
that we have chosen to adapt the strategy
around gender quotas around the rest of the world is to
think about gender targets in the US context. So encouraging donors and political action committees
to set a target for the amount of money they give to women candidates and increase that every year
until they’ve reached parity and they’re giving to men and women candidates. We also want to expand
our work with parties at the local level to create targets, certainly for the number of women and
men they appoint to things. There are a lo
t of appointed positions in this country to boards
and commissions. But there are also lots of appointments to vacancies in state legislatures.
So creating rules around being gender conscious about our rules and appointments is very key.
I like the norm that the Chilean Constitution set that says no gender can be more than 60%
of anybody which I think could work in the United States, just setting a ceiling and not a
floor might help the conversation along in the United States. So I think th
at idea of targets
and incentivizing those by national parties or state parties. Supporting, giving more money
to local parties that have chosen to do those things. I mean that’s… Of course money speaks
loudly in the United States context and I think we could see some real gains for women, at the
local state and national level, if parties made greater commitments to gender balance in
their recruitment and in their nomination. And you also mentioned the money issue or that
just donations, c
ampaign donations seem to have a huge influence in US politics. And you have
these PACs, these super PACs that have immense power in influencing who is actually running
for office. I was wondering like, you know, you as an organization you tried to influence
also those policies that the PAC’s have, the PAC’s have. Is it possible
to actually have some impact with these huge organizations that are driven by
money? And correct me if I’m wrong there. I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell. We
hop
e that it is, yes. I mean there are PACs… We chose about ten PACs in each major
sector. Tech PACs, pharmaceutical PACs, labor PACs and environmental PACs, and looked at
the composition of their boards and the percentage of money they gave to male and female candidates.
And we did some clever,I thought, infographics on them in the 2020 election cycle. And I think
we’re all consumers or many of us are consumers of Twitter or Amazon or Facebook or proctor and
gamble products or Dove or whateve
r it is and I think there’s potential to build public support
for the boards becoming gender balanced of these PACs. Though it’s very hard to decipher. How you
get on the Amazon board is not a very transparent process right now. But I mean it seems like
of all the things that we work on, I feel like there’s potential for some public engagement and
pressure on those things. And I do think that, you know, PACs in the United States were born
out of a time when well-meaning constituencies of vo
ters, labor unions, nurses et cetera… wanted to
have power over politics. So it’s not as though they’re all a bunch of robots. They’re human
beings that are making decisions and they care about policy outcomes as much as anybody, if
not more so. So yes I think there’s a lot of potential. Probably across the logical spectrum
of wanting… of working with PAC leadership to have conversations about internal targets and
commitments. I think there’s a value added in it for them that it makes them
look like they’re
being more responsive to the political climate and the constituents and the people who buy
their products, essentially. So… or are part of their union or care about their issues
in the case of the environment. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of potential there.
Frankly, we haven’t had the bandwidth or the capacity to really go all in on that yet.
But I hope to do that in the coming years. So it’s actually possible to approach them to
get a response or a kind of a foot in t
he door? So far, I would say, we have a big toe
in the door. Maybe not a whole foot. Okay, okay, cool. That’s good to hear. So apart
from, you know, money and institutional changes like the electoral systems used, do you
have any other strategies that you think are successful or that you apply to improve
the role of women in politics, in US politics? Yes, for sure. So just to review, the focus
of RepresentWomen is really looking at the barriers women face both as candidates and as
elected
officials. So the barriers that women face as candidates have to do with whether they’re
recruited to run for office and whether they have support. And that’s in our bucket of work we call
Run. Then there’s the bucket of work we call Win, which is where the electoral system reform
happens. Making sure the level plainfields so that women can win when they run. And that’s where rank
choice voting and proportional rank choice voting come in. So that’s Run and Win. But once they’ve
gotten elect
ed women face additional barriers when serving in office. And the barriers seem to be the
same. Shockingly, whether you’re in Moldova or in Argentina or in the United States. The same around
the world. The lack of affordable child care, no paid leave, not enough compensation, not a
living wage, the inability to vote by proxy, all those things really undermine women’s
ability to serve. In particular, even in the most advanced nations, women often shoulder
the majority of household tasks and
so forth. That’s not true in every household but… So that
if we want women to be able to serve we have to have, you know, nursing rooms, not smoking rooms.
That used to be a little campaign thing there. In a lot of state house buildings, there are places
you could go to smoke a cigarette or a cigar but, I mean, not nurse a child. So I think there’s a
whole set of rules that are really modernization rules to the legislative workplace that have to
happen. And of course the United States is on
e of the few countries that doesn’t have paid leave or
affordable childcare. And so those hurt all women but they hurt women legislators, in particular.
They keep women legislators from considering running. Those are reforms in the lead bucket. And
then they’re reforms that I think are important that I think we’ve touched on already that
ensure that more women are actually in leadership positions. And that takes that same intentionality
that we talked about. Figuring out how to codify best
practices whereby there are women in
political party leadership positions and women in congressional offices and women in campaigns and
women who are heads of committees and women who have power at the federal level. There’s
an organization that I think is just doing amazing work called Inclusive America, run by
a guy named Mark Hanis and his team has done a really great job tracking all the data on women
serving in the Biden administration and I’m not going to remember the stats exactly, b
ut I think
that there are almost no women in certain cabinet positions like in the veterans administration, in
the defense department which is just, you know, the traditional waterloo for women. You know,
are they going to be assigned to the health and housing and education departments? Are they going
to have leadership that’s substantive in domains that have been traditionally for men? And so those
kinds of intentional actions. I think Biden has done a great job on appointing more women to
cabinet positions and diverse women to cabinet positions than any other previous administration.
But there’s still work to be done on that. And taking a step back I think you kind of
mentioned this. How our society has changed over time and I’m wondering whether you
kind of agree with my view that, you know, we moved away from a patriarchal society to a more
individual society, right? And back in the days, the family was much more important. Households
were, and families were responsible
for a lot of the social security, the child care etc. And
obviously the men were kind of in charge of these organizations and so there was no equality. And
then we move away from this patriarchal society to a more individual society but the institutions
and the policies haven’t really kept up with this change right? Because a lot of the functions
that the family had taken care of are now also functions that the state has to provide or take
care of. And so I think there is, like, still a mis
match between how societies developed and what
institutions and policies are actually able to do. Yeah I think there’s a mismatch for sure. But I
know that the United States is such an outlier… I mean we’re so much further behind on child care
and paid leave. And these basic things that many, really, most countries have figured out how to
do, how to accommodate. And have the, you know, taxes go toward a certain amount of credits
for childcare and paid leave. Melinda Gates has been really pu
shing hard on paid leave
in the United States and Maryland passed it, this last year, my state of Maryland. But
there’s a lot of work to do to meet those basic needs. And I think we have some serious
conversations that have to happen too about the building blocks for strong societies. And
of course fair elections and representative democracies are key. But having economic
security and living wages and basic health care needs met and a clean environment.
You know there are a lot of building
blocks to strong societies and of course they’re
all interwoven. But we in the United States, I think, are suffering because we haven’t… We’ve
been so focused on the individual that we have forgotten that individuals make up the fabric of
society and if individuals are constantly under fed and underprivileged and undereducated and
underserved it doesn’t make for a strong society. Do you have any books or articles that
you would recommend to the audience? Well my team at RepresentWomen reco
mmends three
books every week and we’ve been doing that for the last few years so you can go and find those
book recommendations. That’s one thing. There was just a great New York Times article, editorial by
Jesse Wegman about gerrymandering that explores the problem of gerrymandering, the first step of
the solution which are redistricting commissions but ultimately gets to the proportional ranked
choice voting as the solution that we need to eliminate gerrymandering and create a
strong de
mocracy. So I recommend that, that’s by Jesse Wegman. I also recommend a new
blog called Democracy SOS that people can find that is trying to cover a lot of themes on
representation and democracy. I write a blog every week. I’ve been doing it for seven years
on Ms. Magazine. It’s called Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation. So I try to cover
both international and domestic representation issues. And so that’s a lot of blogs if anybody
wants to dive in. You can do so. There’s also a goo
d web site that a lot of political reformers in
the United States pay attention to which is called The Fulcrum which is providing a platform for
people from across that etiological spectrum to share perspectives on reform issues which I think
is great. Just this week in our suggested reading we are recommending the book called The Moment of
Lift by Melinda Gates. We’re also recommending a book by Courtney Emerson who’s a co-founder
of All and Together, called After you Vote, that has a whol
e set of things that concerned
voters can do, and it includes some talk about multi-seat districts and rank choice voting. And
then the third book that we’re recommending this week is by Amber McReynolds who’s name, some
listeners may remember, she is the one woman on the US Postal board right now. She’s on
our board. She wrote a book with another fabulous woman named Stephanie Donner which
is called When Women Vote and that is another great book on the impact of women as voters.
So that’s
probably enough to get more reading. Cool. That’s a great list. Thanks a lot I will
include all of those references in the show notes. Okay, so thanks a lot for sharing all
your thoughts and opinions on these issues. I think it’s really important
to have these discussions. And I really appreciate you’ve taken the time and it
was a pleasure to talk to you. Cynthia Richie Terrell thanks a lot for being a
guest on the Rules of the Game podcast. Thank you very much. I look forward
to continui
ng the conversation. I’m looking forward to that too. Thank you.
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