More women seeking legislative positions
Published 6:00 pm Sunday, July 21, 2019
Women are expected to play a bigger role in the next Louisiana Legislature. Change is expected because term limits are opening 47 of the 144 seats, and at least 20 new women and 23 female incumbents have already announced their candidacies.
The Advocate reported that the Legislature has never had more than 25 women lawmakers. Now, there are 18 women in the House and 5 in the Senate, or only 15.9 percent of the total seats. The national average is 29 percent.
Melanie Oubre, leader of Emerge Louisiana, said, “It’s a start. We have been laser focused on this fall. This is an opportunity to get women to the table.” She said her organization is part of a national effort to recruit and train women to run for elective office as Democrats.
State Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell, has been reaching out to Republican women to run. Camille Conaway of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry is also recruiting women. Her organization has held seven boot camps around the state.
Hewitt said, “We don’t come anywhere near being representative of the demographics of our state. But we can build up our bench strength.” Women make up 55 percent of the state’s registered voters, or 1.63 million of the state’s 2.96 million registered voters.
Few women have ever held leadership posts in the Legislature, The Advocate said. All House speakers and Senate presidents have been white men. Since 1972, the heads of the powerful money committees have been men.
Reflective Democracy Campaign said the 2018 mid-term elections sent a record number of women to Congress, and five states elected enough women to comprise more than 40 percent of their legislatures. Its survey found that women who started early, raised a lot of money and took advantage of the various outreach technologies, like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, had a much better shot at winning.
A 2019 Rutgers University study showed 2,131 women, or 28.9 percent of the 7,383 state legislators in the United States, are women.
Nationally, women lean toward the Democratic Party platforms, but Hewitt said that doesn’t hold true in Louisiana, where several woman legislators are among its most conservative members. Hewitt said she is proud to be among that number.
Women are more diligent about doing whatever it takes to make government work. State Rep. Paula Davis, R-Baton Rouge, for example, sponsored sales tax legislation in 2018, worked diligently to get it approved and it helped stabilize the state budget. We look forward to seeing more women in the state Legislature.
