Women's Representation in U.S. Politics

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

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 governors 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 electoral 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 Center 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 [email protected], and please leave a review and share this episode with friends and colleagues.

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Cynthia Richie Terrell, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. I’m very glad to have you on the show. 

Cynthia Richie Terrell: Thank you very much.

Stephan Kyburz: My first question, as always, is what is your first memory of democracy or of politics in general? 

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 involved 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.

Stephan Kyburz: Was this like a wake up call in terms of political awareness?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: I suppose so, yes. It was during the Vietnam 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 and I felt like there was a lot on the line in that election.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s very interesting. Thanks for sharing these memories. 

Intermezzo

Stephan Kyburz: 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?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 voting 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 leadership across all 3 branches of government. In elected and appointed office at every level of government in the United States.

Stephan Kyburz: 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 discussed. 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?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: Yes, for sure. I would say we talk 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 can 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 people 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.

Stephan Kyburz: 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 the 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.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: Yes I agree. And I think we need to look carefully, perhaps we can 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 either 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 to 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.

Stephan Kyburz: 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 about that change or is it in what state is that discussion on that movement?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 states. 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. 

Stephan Kyburz: And even the difference between single seat or multi-seat districts is not in the constitution. 

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 disenfranchise 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 reasons 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 gerrymandering 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 seat. 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 is 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 american 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.

Stephan Kyburz: 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.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah I know that story. 

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 states 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 they’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 significant. 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 rank 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.

Stephan Kyburz: I totally agree it always matters what office 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 through, right? But obviously it matters what we’re talking about.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 rule 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, organizations 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 candidate 2,1,3 or whatever it is. But it really does change the process and the outcome.

Intermezzo

Stephan Kyburz: 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?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: Well, we know from our extensive international research that gender quotas are the single most effective 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 leadership 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 lot 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 that 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.

Stephan Kyburz: And you also mentioned the money issue or that just donations, campaign 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.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell. We hope 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 whatever 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 voters, 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.

Stephan Kyburz: So it’s actually possible to approach them to get a response or a kind of a foot in the door?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: So far, I would say, we have a big toe in the door. Maybe not a whole foot.

Stephan Kyburz: 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?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 elected 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 one 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, but 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.

Stephan Kyburz: 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 mismatch between how societies developed and what institutions and policies are actually able to do.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: 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 pushing 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.

Intermezzo

Stephan Kyburz: Do you have any books or articles that you would recommend to the audience?

Cynthia Richie Terrell: Well my team at RepresentWomen recommends 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 democracy. 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 good 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 whole 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.

Stephan Kyburz: 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.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: Thank you very much. I look forward to continuing the conversation. 

Stephan Kyburz: I’m looking forward to that too.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: Thank you.