Despite what you may have heard about Mama Grizzlies, 2010 is poised to be a bad year for women in Congress, according to the Los Angeles Times. There are a number of female candidates for Congress and governorships across the country, but the most striking thing about them is their tone; for the most part, they avoid or even shun women's issues.
But the presence of high-profile women in high-profile races doesn't mean there are more of them, and the Times quotes David Wasserman from the Cook Political Report as saying that the women who win in November might not make up for the women who could lose to men, like Sen. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington.
It's not surprising that the number of women in Congress stays below 20 percent when you consider how low the numbers are compared to men in lower-level offices. It's harder to recruit women for office, and it's harder for them to run, and part of that is because women don't have the same access to the networks that would encourage them to run, raise money, and provide support that men do.
Those are long-term, structural problems a few high-profile female candidates can't counteract on their own. When reports come out, and they do steadily, about the problems in getting women to run for office, there is, invariably, a "choice" element: Many women don't seem to want to enter politics. But thinking of "choice" as the opposite of "discrimination," as Brad Peck of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did in his blog post about the pay gap, is wrong. Discrimination and opportunity shape choice, and as long as women see an unfairly matched, uphill battle in every election, they're unlikely to jump in willingly unless they have an unusual amount of resources or support. Wasserman notes that 2010 will be an anomaly; up until this year, the number of women in Congress has been increasing. But the gains are slow and will likely continue to be, no matter what side the women are running on.
-- Monica Potts
