Women made history in Tuesday’s election.
Though the results are not final, a record number of women ran for Congress. Both Democratic and Republican parties were well-represented by female candidates.
This election’s numbers surpassed those of 2018, which saw a 40% increase in female candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and a 28% increase for seats to the U.S. Senate.
This year, 298 women are running for the House, up from 234 in 2018. In the Senate, 21 women are running, down from 23.
There’s still ground to gain to achieve parity.
In this year’s general election, female candidates were running in about one-third of the races for Congress. In elections for statewide executive offices, women were in 34% of the races.
Overwhelmingly, more female candidates identify with the Democratic Party.
In this year’s race for the U.S. House, almost 48% of the nominees are Democratic women, as compared to 23% Republican.
Of special note is the increase in minority women running for office. At least 115 women of color are running for the U.S. House. That’s more than double the number from four years ago.
Of course the most famous of those is Sen. Kamala Harris, the vice presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. Were the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket to win, she would be the first woman of color to serve as vice president.
THIS YEAR we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote, a full 150-plus years after their white male counterparts.
Increasingly, today’s female candidates are not the “suburban women” who President Donald Trump patronizingly paints into a 1950s corner. “We’re getting your husbands back to work,” he said only last week at a campaign rally in Michigan. Memo to the president: Women have jobs, too.
It’s vital that women play a role in making our laws.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was crucial in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2009 that guarantees health insurance for Americans. Critical to women is that they now cannot be charged more for coverage than men. The ACA also helps pay for contraceptives, maternity care and preventative services such as mammograms and bone density scans. It also provides coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, a perk that some private insurance plans continue to find “inconvenient.”
INCREMENTALLY, Americans are accepting that women are as equipped to lead as men. But we’re not there yet.
