The RepresentWomen founder laid out how reforms like ranked-choice voting could double women’s representation in politics in the first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward.

Cynthia Richie Terrell has worked as a political campaign manager and field director for candidates and initiatives at every level of government—but what she wants to win most is the fight to restructure our political system. After co-founding the nonpartisan organization FairVote with her husband, she launched RepresentWomen, an organization devoted to researching and championing evidence-based solutions to the challenges women face at every stage of the political process. (She also writes a weekly column on women’s representation right here at Ms.)
In the first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward — a Ms. podcast exploring the history of the magazine and the feminist movement — Richie Terrell talked to Ms. consulting editor Carmen Rios about the vision of democracy she’s inspired by, practical strategies for advancing gender balance in politics, and what she considers the “gold standard” for equitable voting.
Richie Terrell is joined in the first installment of the new series by SheThePeople founder Aimee Allison, New Mexico state Sen. Charley Angel, pollster and leading political strategist Celinda Lake, and professors and experts in gender, politics, and the law Julie C. Suk and Jennifer M. Piscopo. Together, we explore the promise of a truly representative democracy—and the lessons feminist history offers for how we can advance a feminist future.
Make sure to like, follow and subscribe to Looking Back, Moving Forward today so you won’t miss a second of the conversations and revelations to come. And be sure to keep an eye out for bonus content from every episode in the podcast portal and here on the Ms. website!
This interview has been edited and re-organized for clarity and length.
Carmen Rios: You’ve done a ton of work in the space of political representation, representative and fair democracies. What led you to founding RepresentWomen?
Cynthia Richie Terrell: From an early age—when anybody asked me what I wanted to be—I wanted to be a judge. I had this idea that being a judge was powerful, or interesting, or useful. In my interview for college, I was asked, “What do you want to do?” And I was like: “Well, obviously I’m going to be president. Who doesn’t want to be president?” I always had that sensibility. I don’t think it was a single incident that infused in me the sense that women need equality.
I also did a lot of student government work where I went to college. I was president of the student council, and we took things seriously. We had a budget for speakers, and one of the great opportunities was bringing really cool feminist speakers to campus. I brought Elizabeth Enlow, who is an author, and Petra Kelly, who was the leader of the Green Party from Germany. I really had a sense, through just being involved in advocacy and activism, of what a global feminist movement looked like. I was pretty well-schooled and socialized to think about places around the world where women had exercised their power.
I did electoral politics and campaigns for a few years, and worked for some men and worked for some women. It wasn’t until 1991 that I got hired to work on an Equal Rights Amendment campaign in Iowa by Kathy Spillar and Ellie Smeal. I got a big dose of ERA politics—working on a state ERA campaign, and going up against Ralph Reed from the Christian Coalition, and being in the room when Ellie Smeal was debating Phyllis Schlafly, and getting to talk a lot about women’s rights. I’ve always had in me a sense of the imperative or inevitability of women’s power and gender balance.
Fast-forward to the establishment of FairVote, and our work with a big group of people, ideologically diverse, to really advance voting system reform in the United States. That was great, but I began to be even more interested, about 10 years ago, in the impact that electoral systems were having on women and the disparities in the United States.
At that point, the United States ranked about 102nd or 103rd worldwide globally for women’s representation, and it just seemed appalling to me. We were maybe six years away from the centennial of suffrage, and from suffrage to parity seemed like such a good thing—‘we really need to push hard and get ourselves to parity by the centennial of the 19th Amendment passage ratification.’ Of course, we’re not there yet, and it’s already 2025.
It’s not as though women have ever been fully equal to men. … In general, it’s been tens of thousands of years of discrimination and oppression that women have faced.
Cynthia Richie Terrell
The connection I saw was the fertile ground of democracy reform, and how that had powered women’s representation increases around the world, and realizing that we could do that same thing in the United States. There really wasn’t, and there still isn’t, another sister organization doing similar work — to really look at structural electoral opportunities for women.
Rios: What have you found in your research that explains the gaps in women’s representation that we see in all levels of politics?
Richie Terrell: There are, of course, all sorts of socio-religious barriers that we don’t need to go into—but it’s not as though women have ever been fully equal to men. There are some societies tucked away here and there that had a matrilineal or matriarchal system of government. Some of the tribal women’s representation we’ve done has revealed really interesting practices for Indigenous women and men and how decisions are made. But, in general, it’s been tens of thousands of years of discrimination and oppression that women have faced.
Jumping forward to 250 years ago, when the Constitution was established—women aren’t in the Constitution, and they’re not affirmatively in the Constitution right now. That is a big barrier just on its own. If you look at the lifecycle of a woman from being in school, there are barriers around the way classes are taught and the number of minutes that girls get to speak versus boys. Those all contribute to a sense of whether women feel they’re prepared to run and to win and to have power, and to use that power effectively.
All of that contributes to a sense of women feeling less driven to participate in politics as they are now, so that’s an overwhelming problem. It’s hard to address that with a set of policies or reforms. The solutions that we offer at RepresentWomen are really matched to the structural barriers that we think can be addressed through tangible policy solutions.
We’ve divided our work into four main buckets:
- the barriers and the solutions that exist for when women are thinking of running for office,
- solutions so that more women can win when they run,
- solutions that enable more women to serve effectively, and
- making sure that women can actually be in leadership positions.
Right now, political parties don’t necessarily recruit women to run for office. We see Nancy Pelosi supporting Adam Schiff in the Senate primary in California, when there were two women candidates. There’s a lack of intentionality around whom political parties and party players choose to run for office. There are also a lot of discrepancies in funding for women candidates, so political action committees could set a target for the amount of money they give to women candidates that could increase until parity is reached. We don’t really have a frame of intentionality that a lot of other countries have around who gets recruited to run. That’s a barrier.
There’s also the problem that, in our current winner-take-all plurality system, if more than one woman runs for office, she could easily split the vote. If there are three women running and one man running, sometimes the man wins a primary because the voters are torn among those three women. Those are some of the barriers for women actually running for office.
When we think of barriers to women winning when they run, we have a huge problem with lack of competition in our electoral system. We all have heard the data and the stats. We all know that only about six or seven presidential states matter in the presidential election. That means a lot of votes can get cast for candidates, Elizabeth Warren or other people, that don’t matter at all. There’s a lack of incentive or lack of capacity for women voters in a lot of places to impact the outcome of elections.
We also have so few competitive congressional districts, maybe 40 of 435, really in play. That’s a problem when it’s coupled with the rate of incumbency. It’s super hard for challengers to win. We can have a giant and fabulous pipeline of incredible women, but if incumbents win at the rate of 96, 97, 98 percent, it’s pretty hard to change who has power in those situations. While it’s not quite as bad in state legislatures, we’re still operating around those same principles—single-winner districts with winner-take-all voting rules, where more than one woman candidate can spoil the election, and women are often told to wait their turn, and a lot of incumbents are winning.
There’s an opportunity in the moment we’re in. … There’s an appetite to really take on the dysfunction in our electoral system that led to the outcome that we’re dealing with right now.
Cynthia Richie Terrell
The third area that RepresentWomen looks at are the barriers that exist in the governing process. Once women have run and they’ve won, what’s going on in the legislature? It varies widely. The kinds of barriers that we look at are rates of pay for legislators—there are some states, like New Mexico, where legislators aren’t paid at all.
There are very few states that offer paid leave or proxy voting. There was just a case in Congress with Brittany Pettersen—she just had a baby and it would’ve been easier if she could’ve participated digitally or via a proxy vote, but that was ruled to not be permissible. That’s clearly a barrier for women with young children, people who are working several jobs, people who in the state legislature live far away from the capitol. If you’re in San Diego and you want to serve in office, moving to Sacramento is a big barrier for a lot of women who are caretakers in their family.
We have been looking at a whole range of ideas to make the workplace of government a place that is full time and well paid, has benefits. The fourth category is how can we really make sure that women can lead when they’re in office? How can we ensure that women are chairs of committees, and women have leadership in political parties — and women are recognized as being donors, building the team of women candidates?
That again takes some intentional actions. It takes a rule around who gets to be a committee chair and what that process looks like, and making sure we’re prioritizing women candidates. The DNC has adopted provisions whereby there is supposed to be gender balance in the leadership. If a man wins for the chair of the DNC, then there have to be at least two vice presidents. There are three vice presidents for this very reason—so that they can have gender balance. And thanks to our good friend, Tom Perez, there are provisions within the DNC rules and bylaws for nonbinary people, as well. They’re really trying to be inclusive.
Both the Democratic and the Republican Party, to some extent, have gender balance rules for that first rung of political participation—precinct chairs and committee people. You run for a slate either as a man or a woman, and that’s why the Democratic Convention is completely gender balanced. At the Republican Convention, about 40 percent of states adhere to that rule. Thinking about intentionality and leadership, how can we really lift up women leaders in order to inspire other people to want to run for office?
Rios: What are some of the reforms you see as really key at this moment, that the RepresentWomen team is pushing for?
Richie Terrell: We have a really good international research team. We have a staffer who lives in Cairo, and she keeps track of women’s representation in every country and in some nation states around the world, even in unrecognized states. We’ve got a really good handle on what’s helping to elect women around the world and the common themes are the gender quotas that you mentioned, and then the proportional systems of one sort or another that give voters more power to determine the outcome of elections. Those two things we see as really the most viable kinds of reforms that we could employ in the United States.
The reason that RepresentWomen is drawn to these solutions is that they’re also the most transformative. There are all kinds of great reforms out there, but to get to the core of how to undo the solid hold that incumbents have on power, you really need to change the system and the incentives in the system that elects them. That’s why we’re drawn to this electoral reform. It’s no coincidence that the 50 top countries for women’s representation all have either a form of gender quotas, legislative or party-based, or constitutional, or they have a proportional voting system.
It’s not like the women in those countries are better. The men aren’t better. It’s that they have different electoral systems.
I want women to feel safe and secure, and well paid, and proud, and in charge of our autonomy in every way, and part of every decision that impacts us and impacts our families. That’s doable, but it’s going to require a lot of shifting of power—away from older people, from white people, from men.
Cynthia Richie Terrell
In the United States context, we elect about 520,000 offices, 75 percent of them are nonpartisan and about 75 percent of them are single-winner. There are not that many reforms that can work in a nonpartisan, single-winner kind of environment. Ranked-choice voting happens to be the reform that works well in both of those contexts. Ranked-choice voting is the system where you get to rank your candidates in order of preference and the last place finisher is eliminated. Those votes are redistributed until you get a majority winner.
In political science, I’ve learned that the same thing often has many terms to describe it: Ranked-choice voting is also described as an instant runoff vote in places like Georgia or New York City, where they traditionally have runoffs, combining those elections into one election not only saves a lot of money, but means that more people get to participate in the decisive election.
Women hold 52 percent of seats in jurisdictions with ranked-choice voting—and that’s about twice the norm, roughly. We’re talking about states, cities, counties, but that’s pretty impressive when you think of a single reform where women are winning about twice as many seats as the norm. It’s just been more impactful than a lot of other reforms.
The beauty of ranked-choice voting is it eliminates split votes, it enables more women to run, campaigns are often more civil. Endorsing organizations can endorse more than one candidate, and then candidates really have an incentive to find common ground and work together. That not only appeals to women candidates, but it appeals to voters, and we’ve seen turnout go up in a lot of the jurisdictions with ranked-choice voting as well.
I’ve talked about those 75 percent of seats that are single-winner, meaning you just elect one person either to the legislature or to a district — but there also are seats in this country that are multi-winner, where you elect and you run at-large. There are 10 states that have multiseat districts of one sort or another for their legislature—and you can use a form of ranked-choice voting in a multiseat district. It’s sometimes called at-large, depending on the context, sometimes multiwinner, sometimes multiseat.
We think that’s really the gold standard, and it’s a form of proportional representation that’s used in the Australian Senate. It’s a candidate-based system, so it fits well within our culture. You don’t vote for a party, but you get to vote for an individual candidate, which we think matches the psychology of most Americans. In the Australian Senate, women hold 57 percent of seats, which is pretty impressive.
Our friends Jamie Raskin and Don Beyer, two great members of Congress, have introduced the Fair Representation Act, which combines ranked-choice voting with multiseat districts and independent redistricting commissions to create a mandate for that system to be used in every congressional district. If that were the case, we’d have some five-seat districts, we’d have some three-seat districts—we’d have some states that would just elect all of the candidates with ranked-choice voting.
The magic of a five seat district includes the following: We’d end gerrymandering because you would no longer be trying to draw a district to determine the outcome based on who you put in that district. Voters would shockingly be able to elect the candidates who represent them without a bunch of people somehow drawing those single-winner districts. You’d get a much more authentic spread of ideological beliefs.
Take Georgia. In a five seat district you would have probably a conservative republican and maybe a liberal democrat, maybe you’d have a couple of moderates in that five seat district. In that five-seat district, multiple communities of color would also get to elect candidates of choice. Right now, as Lani Guinier would say, the winner-take-all, single-winner district system relies on segregation for voters to have power, and sadly, some racial minorities are more segregated than others.
The Black majority districts in the South work well until the Black community begins to lose population, and then the Latinos are going to take that seat, and Black voters don’t have the kind of representation they might select otherwise. There are other kinds of communities that aren’t large enough to have a majority of the vote, but still obviously deserve a seat at the table and representation and want to be in play. In a five-seat district with ranked-choice voting, all voters are in play for all candidates.
For all those reasons, the proportional form of ranked-choice voting is really the best system—and the cherry on the top, the icing on the cake, the brewer’s yeast on the tofu—is that women would probably win about 40 percent more seats just based on the data around ranked-choice voting, and women’s representation is about twice the number percentage in multiseat districts. That’s a pretty quick way to, within one or two election cycles, almost double the amount of women who are in Congress and in state legislatures.
This year we saw the first decline in two decades of women in the House of Representatives, which I find really shocking, and it’s due to all those constraints in our polarized, rigid system. The only way that we’re really going to address that and tackle that is to change the electoral system. We can’t spend our way out of it. We already spent, what, 15 billion dollars on House and Senate races in the 2024 election cycle—yet we have the first decline in women’s representation. It’s not a spending issue per se. We know we’ve got a huge field of talented women, but we need to break up the gridlock of our electoral system in order to get them elected.
We need to embrace a new reality in which we’re going to have to do some incredible collective organizing to protect what we believe in about this country.
Cynthia Richie Terrell
Rios: You make it sound so easy! At this moment in time, where so much is at stake and there’s so much chaos, it feels like the idea of actually progressing or advancing progress feels really challenging, because we’re trying to hang onto the few things that we had built. What do you think it’s going to take to advance some of these reforms?
Richie Terrell: I think there has been some really good news coming out of countries around the world. Mexico is a really great example where they established gender quotas. They weren’t particularly well enforced, but they decided to really enforce them and knuckle down. Now women are at parity, they have gender balance. Women hold about 40 percent of governorships in Mexico because of similar rules. The semi-proportional voting system in Mexico also means that parties are more responsive to the voters and are attracting women candidates to be on the party list in Mexico.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily the perfect democracy that we want to aspire to. I’m not sure there are many countries right now, outside of the Nordic states, that we might say that about. But Mexico is a really good example—there were the gender quotas, there was a proportional system, and there was a really strong women’s led democracy movement. That was just a real feminist movement. They came out for massive protests, they understood policy, they pushed the parties to be more inclusive and pluralistic.
As for ranked-choice voting, that reform has had a pretty impressive track record for women in cities—in states maybe less so, but in cities it’s been just an amazing track record, hardly lost in any city, and is now used in the largest cities in seven states, and that’s often because the elections are pretty much all nonpartisan. There can be these split votes in cities among women candidates, and cities from New York City to Minneapolis to San Francisco have all embraced this new model of ranked-choice voting. There’s a lot of momentum at the city level including some places like Portland, Ore., that are using the proportional form of ranked-choice voting.
There’s an opportunity in the moment we’re in. We’re all scrambling, to one extent to another, to feel like we’re doing something. Those of us who have the privilege to be helping in this moment are asking: “What can I do to help?” There’s obviously a need for conversation around those immediate needs and reactions, but I also think there’s an appetite to really take on the dysfunction in our electoral system that led to the outcome that we’re dealing with right now.
There’s energy around the National Popular Vote to figure out what to do around the Electoral College. There is energy in Congress to take on the role of money. There’s energy among our nonprofit allies to really understand the scope of the problem with a lack of accountability in Congress. It’s not an easy task. I don’t mean to oversimplify it, but if there’s ever been a window for trying new things that haven’t been tried, I would say this is it. We see that happening in ways that do not support the Constitution. I think there’s an appetite to support innovation in ways that are aligned with the Constitution.
Rios: How do you think our democracy will change when these reforms do come to pass?
Richie Terrell: I like that you’re using the word “when” and not “if.” We’ve already made a plan.
Americans are really hungry to have a voice—and Americans, fundamentally believe in fairness and justice and equality. During the Super Bowl, so often there are these ads—a dad’s on a motorcycle with a child on the back, and the child pulls off their helmet and it’s a girl with long hair. That sells to Americans because Americans believe in—I don’t want to say it’s a myth, but—this promise of equality and pluralism. So many of us, people like me, came from another place for that sense of pluralism.
My family is Quaker. They were persecuted and killed in England. We came here because of religious pluralism, and we believe in ethnic and racial pluralism and everybody having a voice at the table. My conception of this is that everybody has power in accordance to their proportion of the population in some way or another. That means we need approximate gender balance for women and for men, and we need ideological balance, and we need racial and ethnic balance and representation. We need far more young people in office.
With that kind of pluralist vision of decision makers, then we are in a much better position to make policies that really answer the needs of voters and constituents. We’re not pitted in this fight where one representative from some single-winner district in one place is trying to protect jobs for their district and somebody else is trying to protect the jobs for their district. In a truly representative democracy, everybody has a voice at the table, everybody has an incentive to work together, and we spend our time figuring out policies that work for the good of the community.
A lot of people feel like there are some clearly delineated them and us—now more than ever, we really need to figure out how to broaden our community and our tent, instead of reducing it. That may require us to have uncomfortable conversations and put ourselves in places, in decision making roles, that feel uncomfortable.
There are a lot of moderate Republican women out there who really do want their girls to be safe, and have a good education, and have access to birth control and healthcare rights, and get a good job. And there are a lot of young women and young nonbinary people who really believe in this better world, We’ve got to be expansive in our thinking about the teams that we’re part of, and the community that we’re trying to build. It’s dangerous, at times like this, for us to fall into the trap of just huddling close to the people we know best. We’ve got to have big arms and a big tent. We have morality, and justice, and the vision on our side.
Americans believe in the promise of equality and pluralism.
Cynthia Richie Terrell
Rios: This podcast looks back on 50-plus years of feminist organizing and 59-plus years of writing in Ms. What do you hope is next? What do you hope has changed 50 years from now?
Richie Terrell: We need to shift who has power in this country. The history of the United States has been a long struggle that will continue, and I would hope that within 50 years we’d be much closer to that promise of John Adams to have Congress be a portrait of the people in miniature. That’s what I really want to see. I don’t want to have any one gender completely in charge of anything, but I do want women to feel safe and secure, and well paid, and proud, and in charge of our autonomy in every way, and part of every decision that impacts us and impacts our families. That’s doable, but it’s going to require a lot of shifting of power—away from older people, from white people, from men.
Frederick Douglass has that great line, that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” We wouldn’t have to be demanding this if systems, current leadership and current power-holders, welcomed in women more regularly or more systematically—but it’s going to take our generation’s version of a demand to make that happen. That can happen electorally, it can happen economically, and it can happen socially.
We need to embrace a new reality in which we’re going to have to do some incredible collective organizing to protect what we believe in about this country and some incredible innovation to really understand what’s working well in other countries, and really embrace that vision of what a remodeled power structure looks like.
We can’t rely simply on being invited to the party that’s already happening. We’ve got to push our own major women’s led democracy and everything else movement, and use all the strategies that we can think of to get that job done and reach that vision of a gender-balanced world.
Listen to Looking Back, Moving Forward on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts—and be sure to like, follow and subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode! You can also explore more bonus footage from every episode in the Ms. archives.