More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Financial sanctions and incentives to enforce gender quotas have been gaining popularity both in politics and business over the last decade.
But in the U.S., despite decades of demanding a seat at the table, women make up less than 30 percent of all elected officials. Political parties and our government have a role to play in improving women’s political representation up and down the ballot; and, it is time they start using their money to make it happen.
RepresentWomen’s 2020 Gender Parity Index (GPI), scores and ranks all 50 states for women’s representation at the local, state and national level—giving an annual snapshot of the United States’ progress, or lack thereof, toward parity.
The lack of women in elected office is not the result of a lack of qualified women, but our electoral system which continues to hamper women’s attempts to run, win, serve and lead at equal rates to men.
Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar will now join a mere handful of women who have won primary delegates in U.S. history—bringing the total up to seven.
American political parties have the legal right to include and enforce gender quotas for candidate recruitment and ballot inclusion—and they have a history and precedent of enforcing affirmative action rules when it comes to appointed and elected party positions. Yet the U.S. remains one of the few countries where some form of gender quotas do not exist.
The political landscape over the last decade was marked by increasing polarization, partisan majorities in many states that impose policies out of step with the views of most Americans—and gerrymandering and winner-take-all electoral systems making a mockery of the prospect of political accountability. But it was also a decade in which ranked choice voting (RCV) spread across the country.
Ranked choice voting has been shown to increase the number of women and people of color running in and winning elections—and the results of the 2019 elections prove that it works.
Switzerland’s 2019 elections culminated in many historic outcomes, including women seizing 20 more seats in the House of Representatives.
