Parity in numbers doesn’t always mean parity in power
By April Corbin Girnus
Members of the U.S. Congress and state legislatures nationwide are overwhelmingly men, and the highest political glass ceiling in the country remains unbroken after the re-election of a man found liable for sexual abuse against a woman. But in Nevada, a majority women state legislature appears to be the new norm.
Researchers at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University last year released Rethinking Women’s Political Power, an overlooked report that shed light on the nuance of holding elected office and highlighted the work that needs to be done after the initial celebrations of gender parity end. Their findings are worth revisiting amid the post-election debates about the value of ‘identity politics’ and what it means to have political power in the United States.
“It’s not that influential to have a bunch of women in power if they are going to align themselves with patriarchy,” Leslie Turner, the co-director of the Mass Liberation Project Nevada, told CAWP, which conducted interviews between 2021 and 2023, “and (if) they are going to align themselves with status quo, and they are going to align themselves with mass incarceration and all of the things that are consistently impacting our community.”
“So I don’t necessarily consider that power,” she added.
Or, as former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones Blackhurst opined to researchers, “It’s all about control.” The parties’ legislative caucuses “really don’t care whether they control with men or women.”
The cloud of Kamala
“Progress is not inevitable.”
So began a statement CAWP released after former President Donald Trump secured a second term by defeating Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We have too often seen that people see these milestones and they think, ‘We’re good,’” Kelly Dittmar, CAWP director of research, told the Current. “In the context of Nevada, (the presidential election) is a good reminder that you cannot assume that once you’ve achieved a milestone that, without any effort, we will either progress further or even maintain that progress.”
In 2016, Nevadans supported making Hillary Clinton the first woman president. In 2020, they backed Joe Biden and Harris as the first woman vice president. But this year, Trump won Nevada with 50.59% of the vote, compared to Harris’s 47.49%.
“Nevada has elected a record number of women. You’re not going to say Jacky Rosen is going to lose just because she was a woman, right? There were other factors that were at play, and I think that’s true at the presidential level,” said Dittmar.
She continued, “What the election did show us is that this country is very willing to elect somebody who’s openly misogynistic and racist.”
But they did that while also supporting women like Rosen, who defeated Republican challenger Sam Brown, and other women further down the ballot.
Nevada, by the numbers
In 2019, Nevada became the first state with a majority woman legislature, and it has now maintained its majority women legislature for three election cycles. Arizona in 2023 joined the Silver State in having achieved a woman majority, but as of publication time had fallen to 50-50 parity. Colorado is also currently at parity. A handful of other states are nearing parity, according to a tracker maintained by CAWP.
Both chambers of the Nevada State Legislature are now about 60% women. The Senate will be composed of 13 women and eight men, while the Assembly will have 25 women and 17 men.
In the Assembly, where each of the 42 seats are up every two years, women could theoretically have won three-fourths of seats if every woman running had won. That outcome was unlikely because several of the women were running in districts where their party has an extreme partisan disadvantage. But their presence is also noteworthy, said Dittmar, because it normalizes women being on the ballot.
Several women gave incumbent men a run for their money this year. In Nevada State Assembly District 12, Democratic incumbent Max Carter defeated Republican challenger Nancy Roecker by fewer than 300 votes, or less than 1% of votes.
Some of this year’s most high profile and competitive state legislative races featured two women running against one another: Democratic Assemblywomen Elaine Marzola and Selena La Rue Hatch both successfully fended off women challengers. Democratic state Sen. Dallas Harris lost re-election to Republican Lori Rogich.
Parity in numbers vs. parity in power
Nevada should be celebrated for being the first state to achieve a majority woman state legislature, said Dittmar, but as gender parity becomes its new norm, the conversation about women and power needs to go beyond raw numbers.
“What is the political ecosystem in which these milestones are achieved, in which women are high — or low — in representation?” she asks.
Former Nevada State Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley told CAWP that women need to be in decision-making roles: “That is the whole keg. It’s not just to be in the body. It’s not to be freshmen. It’s to be in leadership.”
In 2007, Buckley, a Democrat, became the first woman to serve as speaker of the Nevada State Assembly. (That position is currently held by a man, Democratic Assemblyman Steve Yeager, who was reelected to the leadership role by his caucus this month. But a woman, Democratic state Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro, serves as the Senate majority leader.)
State Sen. Rochelle Nguyen, a Democrat whose appointment to a vacant seat in 2019 helped push the Legislature into having a woman majority, also highlighted the importance of women in leadership roles, saying the presence of women was more acutely felt when they began serving as committee chairs.
Legislative leaders and committee chairs control what bills receive hearings or advance for chamber floor votes.
Seven of the 10 Senate committees during the next legislative session will be chaired by women. Top caucus positions are also held by women: Alongside Cannizzaro, state Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop will serve as president pro-tempore, state Sen. Roberta Lange as assistant majority leader, and state Sen. Melanie Scheible as chief majority whip. (Two men, state Sens. Fabian Doñate and Senator Skip Daly, will serve as deputy majority whips.)
On the other side of the Legislative Building, the Nevada Assembly Democrats have not yet announced leadership roles beyond Yeager, but they are expected to reflect the majority women Democratic caucus there. In 2023, women chaired nine of the 10 Assembly committees.
Beyond the chamber
Dittmar believes CAWP’s conversations with women in Nevada affirmed that “when you think about political institutions that are gendered, that are racialized, that are classed, those roots of biases and inequities don’t resolve themselves simply by having 50% women or greater racial and ethnic diversity.”
Cecia Alvarado, a Democratic political consultant, told CAWP she feels Latina electeds do not automatically feel empowered to advocate for their communities because “if they do, they may get kicked out.”
“I think there’s a sense also [that] they are limited on what they can do, how vocal they can be if they want to stay in office, if they want to move up in leadership positions,” she said. “…Whenever they are willing to speak up [on] something that…may create disagreement with others, they have to first…[ask], ‘Would you have my back if they try to primary me? Would you help me?’ And again, it goes back to the validation [of] ‘Who is going to be there for me if I do speak up about this?’”
The Legislature does not operate within a vacuum.
The Nevada State Legislature is less powerful than many state legislatures because it meets only every other year for 120 days. Many within the state consider the Clark County Commission to be the most powerful political body. (That seven-member board does not currently have gender parity, though it has in past years. The Commission currently has one woman on it, longtime Democratic lawmaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick, though that will change to two once Commissioner-elect April Becker, a Republican, is sworn in.)
No woman has ever served as governor of the Silver State. Nevada’s U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, a Democrat, got closest to the coveted seat, losing by 4 points to Republican Jim Gibbons in 2006.
Becky Harris, a former Nevada state senator and chair of the Gaming Control Board, told researchers she agreed with the sentiment that, because legislatures are a collective akin to team sport, “real progress” can’t happen until more women are executives.
“Until you are the final and sole decision-maker, women can be in legislatures and that’s a wonderful thing – I don’t want to minimize that – but the true power lies in the executive,” said Harris.
Women have held top positions in organized labor. The Culinary Union was headed by a woman secretary-treasurer, Geoconda Argüello-Kline, for a decade before she retired in 2022. But the gaming industry is dominated by men, many of them making exorbitant amounts of money. An American Gaming Association report from 2023 found men held 70% of executive-level and senior level management positions in the industry.
One 2021 analysis of registered lobbyists in Nevada found that 41% were women. But several women told CAWP that the political industrial complex is not as diverse as it could or should be.
Megan Jones, a Democratic political consultant, described the lobby corps as “still largely dominated by white men because corporations are still dominated by white men and those lobbyists are comfortable hiring people that look like them and people that talk like them and people that act like them.”
That impacts policy discussions, she suggested, referencing a 2019 bill mandating that employees at businesses with 50 or more workers earn a total of 40 hours (five standard work days) of paid leave annually.
Added Jones, “I think [it] puts our female-majority legislature in a strange spot because [women legislators] are then not taken as seriously on the policy front or they are [viewed as] too progressive because they are advocating for two weeks of paid leave instead of one or whatever it is, right? That is a real argument that we had in the legislature with a female majority saying we want paid leave, and the corporate white lobbyists are like, ‘Why?’”
