Women will make up the majority of lawmakers in three state legislatures, some for the first time.
Despite Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 presidential election, women now make up the majority of lawmakers in several western statehouses, including those in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.
“In about half the states across the country this cycle, women made numerical gains in the number of seats that they hold in state legislatures,” Sabrina Shulman, chief political officer with Vote Run Lead Action an organization focused on recruiting and training women to run for office, told the Washington Examiner.
Shulman said state legislatures are of heightened importance because they are “really the place where some of the most critical policy decisions are being made, those that affect women and families, civil and human rights.”
For example, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a territorial law from 1864 that banned abortion outright was enforceable. Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) called upon the Republican-controlled state legislature to bring the state back to its 2022 law, which bans abortion at the 15-week mark of a woman’s pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. After back and forth in both chambers of the state house, the state reverted back to the 2022 law.
Nevada has had a female-majority state legislature since 2018, making it the longest-kept female majority in U.S. history. It was also the first state to ever reach a female majority. Three-fifths of state lawmakers in Nevada are women.
Each state that elected a female-majority legislature is in the West, which could be a coincidence or perhaps a trend due to western states being relatively young as compared to the colonial states on the East Coast. Shulman attributed that trend to “the ethos of the West.”
“There were a lot of women who were in, you know, formal and informal leadership roles as those states were being formed,” Shulman explained, adding that her organization thinks “there is something to that in women who had stepped up to help create communities, build industry, that was a little bit different than how the sort of older founding states on the Eastern Seaboard were formed.”
“We do think there’s something to the sort of difference in how, in the culture and how those states operate,” she said.
Including states without female majorities leading the state legislatures, 15 of 50 states have female state senate presidents, 11 of whom are Democrats and four of whom are Republicans, and 10 of 50 states have female House speakers, nine of whom are Democrats and one who is a Republican, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
On the national level, however, women’s representation appears to have widely declined. In addition to Harris losing the presidential race, in the House of Representatives, not a single woman is set to lead any House committee for the first time since the 109th Congress, in office from 2005-2007. All 17 standing committees will be dominated by men when the new Congress is seated on Jan. 3, 2025.
Shulman pointed out that the trend away from women in national leadership after Republicans won the elections is happening at the same time as they are seeing expanding representation statewide, particularly in deep-red states such as Texas and Florida.
“Republican women are also making gains in representation, particularly in state legislatures,” Shulman said. “And yet at the highest levels of government in this country, they’re seeing their party turn the clock back. They’re seeing their party move back to this old boys’ club.”
Shulman said there is an opportunity for women in the Republican Party to “step up” and say, “‘We are here in the party infrastructure as well. … If we’re not represented at those tables and at the heads of some of those tables, this party is not representing me.’”
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While President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet is also composed of an overwhelming majority of men, he has nominated eight women to senior roles in his administration, double the number he nominated during his first term. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, will be the first woman to hold that position. His nominees for attorney general, surgeon general, homeland security secretary, and labor secretary are all women.
Alternatively to Shulman’s perspective, one Trump official told the Hill, “You’re not seeing an administration that’s sort of an old boys’ club.”