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The 2016 elections were a historic disappointment for advocates of women’s political parity in the United States. Not only did the first female major party candidate for the White House fail to win the highest office in the land, but around the nation, political representation by women continued its now nearly two-decades-long stall as well.

Women comprise 50.8 percent of the U.S. population.¹ Yet as January 2017 began:

• Women made up just 19.4 percent of incoming members of the House² and held just 21 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate³
• They were 24.8 percent of state legislators, 10 percent of governors, and only 18.8 percent of mayors of all U.S. cities with more than 30,000 residents⁴
• They were down one governorship since 2016,⁵ had lost one seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and had gained just one seat in the U.S. Senate⁶
• Overall, they occupied less than 25 percent of elected offices at all levels of government in the United States⁷

The gloomy statistics on women’s political fortunes coexist, oddly enough, with solid signs that, in recent years, American attitudes toward women in public office have significantly changed for the better. In June 2015, 92 percent of Americans said that they were ready to elect a female president⁸—and in November 2016, Americans did just that, choosing Hillary Clinton in the popular vote by a margin of nearly 3 million.⁹ A considerable body of polling and academic research has shown that Americans have overwhelmingly moved past many of the traditional sexist attitudes that held female would-be politicians back in the past.¹⁰ Americans no longer believe that women are constitutionally unfit for elected office. In fact, a sizable minority believes that, in some respects, women are even better suited for office than men.¹¹

In other words, these days, if women run, they can win¹²—particularly if they’re Democrats. According to new research from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, women were 28 percent of Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2016 general election—and 32 percent of Democratic winners; they were 11 percent of Republican candidates for the House and 9 percent of Republican winners. On the Senate side, women were 31 percent of Democratic candidates in the November election and 42 percent of winners, while Republican women were 12 percent of candidates and 5 percent of winners.¹³

Democrat or Republican, however, women are not running for elected office at anywhere near the rate they need to in order to achieve something even close to parity. In the 2014 campaign season, the last year for which a full set of numbers is available, women were only 28 percent of candidates for federal, state, and local office in the United States. That same spring, women made up 29 percent of elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels, according to the Reflective Democracy Campaign, which compiled both sets of numbers.¹⁴

The near-parallelism of these percentages is compelling, particularly when viewed in light of earlier research showing that women are about as likely as men to win congressional elections in comparable races¹⁵—if they get on the ballot—and more recent research showing that they’re almost as likely as men to succeed in mayoral races, if they get on the ballot.¹⁶ Further research shows that if they make it onto the ballot and run in comparable races, women do as well as men in fundraising too.¹⁷

As the dust settles from the 2016 campaign year and as advocates of women’s political parity turn to contemplating next steps, a few basics are clear:

• As Hillary Clinton’s decisive, nearly 3-million-vote win of the U.S. popular vote indicates, Americans do see women as viable political leaders.
• This willingness to vote for women, however, is not translating into steadily increasing numbers of women in political office.
• To figure out why—and then prevent this disconnect from continuing—it’s time to move on from old analyses that focus uniquely on voter bias and look instead at what’s preventing voters from having the chance to express their support for women candidates in the first place.
• Doing so requires a detailed look at the structural impediments to women’s political participation—the whole constellation of forces having to do with recruitment, fundraising, and the support of political power brokers, or so-called gatekeepers—that keep women off ballots and out of office.
• Correcting the problem will require a set of concrete and structural solutions to open up the political universe to the most diverse range of newcomers, including women of all races and socio-economic backgrounds.

This report explores in detail how institutional forces having to do with candidate selection and support operate, and why they tend to keep women out. It also proposes a set of structural solutions to address this problem through both voluntary measures and public policy. Notably, the report recommends that:

• Our political parties should change how they recruit and groom candidates, and they should set voluntary numerical goals to encourage a rapid rise in the percentage of women on ballots
• Cities, states, and the U.S. Congress should enact legislation to reduce the role of big money in elections and adopt systems of small-donor public financing
• States should pay officeholders a living wage to permit those without independent means or highly flexible careers to pursue careers in public service, and they should make sure that their legislative bodies adopt the same sorts of family-friendly workplace policies that private-sector employers now use to attract and retain women
• Individual donors and political action committees should set voluntary goals to increase funding for women candidates, particularly in open-seat elections, which offer the best opportunities for outsiders

Shifting the public conversation on women’s political progress from a discussion of attitudes—among voters, the media, and the so-called ambition gap among potential women candidates themselves—to the structural factors that block women’s progress will require a major change, not just in tactics but also in mentalities.

Americans tend to view running for office through an up-by-the-bootstraps, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” storyline and to downplay the structural factors that have historically expanded the choices and enhanced the political opportunities of some at the expense of others. The belief that the political path is equally open to all people with enough gumption to follow it, however, is naive. In the long term, real structural factors have created a permanent political class of white, male—and in recent decades, increasingly wealthy—Mr. Smiths.

For our political leaders to be so unrepresentative of modern-day America is toxic for our democracy. It reinforces the now-pervasive belief that our government is divorced from and unresponsive to the concerns of everyday people. And as we have recently seen, this belief reinforces the sort of political nihilism that allows destructive extremism to grow.

Women make up just more than half of the U.S. population.²⁰ They account for 47 percent of the U.S. labor force²¹ and 49 percent of the college-educated workforce,²² while at the same time they perform the lion’s share of caregiving for children and other relatives.²³ This means that their grounding in the day-to-day challenges that most Americans face could not be more complete—and that the need for their leadership could not be more pressing.

In the latter decades of the 20th century, it seemed that as women moved up in the professions, and as public attitudes toward women’s responsibilities and capabilities gradually improved, political parity would follow. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.

The 1970s and 1980s saw slow but steady increases in women’s representation in the U.S. House and Senate, accelerated dramatically by the surge of new female members following the 1992 congressional elections—termed the “Year of the Woman”—that brought 28 new women to Congress.²⁴ But recent decades have brought much more uneven progress. The percentage of women in Congress actually dropped in 2010,²⁵ before rising again in 2014 and then staying flat in 2016. At 23.7 percent, women’s representation in statewide elected offices as governors, lieutenant governors, state comptrollers, and the like is also down from a high point of 28.5 percent in 2000.²⁶ There were nine female governors in 2004 and 2007; there are only four today—one fewer than postelection, now that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has been confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.²⁷ And the percentage of women who serve as state legislators, which stands today at 25 percent, has essentially remained flat since 2009.²⁸

This persistent underrepresentation of women at all levels of elected office, from city councils on up, means that they aren’t taking their place in the political pipeline that will produce America’s future leaders. In fact, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has calculated that if the pace of women’s progress continues at the same rate it has since 1960, political parity will not be reached in the United States until the year 2117.²⁹

What explains this glacial rate of change? For a long time, the perceived culprit was voter sexism—with good reason. As recently as the 1970s, deep-seated prejudice against female politicians still held sway in a wide portion of the electorate. In 1977, fully 47 percent of respondents to the General Social Survey, a nationally representative sampling of Americans conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, expressed agreement with the belief that “most men are better suited emotionally for politics than most women.”³⁰ That number had dropped to 17 percent by 2014, the most recent year for which results are available³¹—and polling by the Pew Research Center in 2015 found that 75 percent of Americans said women and men make “equally good political leaders.” Pew also discovered that significant and consistent majorities of Americans now believe there are no meaningful differences between men and women when it comes to leadership traits such as decisiveness, ambition, and intelligence.³²

In fact, rather than being viewed as a handicap, being female can now work to candidates’ advantage. In the past decade, female senators’ well-publicized bipartisan dinners, co-sponsorship of legislation, and—most famously—ability to lead their fractious colleagues to the budget deal that ended the 2013 government shutdown have led to the widespread belief that female politicians are more skilled than men in the art of compromise—a view shared by 34 percent of Americans, according to Pew.³³

Voter sexism, and outright misogyny, do, of course, still exist; the 2016 presidential election provided countless examples, generated by both candidates and voters. And while data on how women fare as candidates for state-level executive office are very limited, one 2015 study³⁶ conducted for the Barbara Lee Family Foundation by Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics, did yield some troubling results.

Dittmar studied the nine gubernatorial campaigns in 2014 in which women were on the ballot—looking at press coverage, polls, debates, social media, and campaign output—and interviewed candidates and members of their campaign staffs. She found, consistent with previous research, that women candidates had to prove their qualifications for executive office while also meeting voters’ higher “likeability” demands upon them as candidates. What this appears to mean is that in order to win, women campaigning for executive office must perform gender in just the right way to hit the sweet spot in voter attitudes—conforming to positive stereotypes while countering negative ones.

In an interview for this report, Dittmar, the author of a 2015 book on gender in statewide races,³⁷ observed that there were “different rules” and “different expectations” for the female gubernatorial candidates she studied. “Winning could be, for women, evidence that they navigate this terrain successfully,” she said.³⁸

When it comes to legislative elections, however, a solid body of research has emerged to make the case that gender bias on the part of voters does not play a meaningful role at the ballot box. For example, Barbara Burrell, professor emerita of political science at Northern Illinois University, studied the role of gender in election campaigns for Congress spanning 1968 to 2010 for her 2014 book, Gender in Campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives. Her conclusion: “Not only do women win when they run, they run in the same ways and face the same obstacles as male candidates.”³⁹

More recently, for their 2016 book Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era, Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, political scientists at George Washington University and American University, respectively, examined voter attitudes, voting behavior, and media coverage in every congressional district in the United States during the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. They concluded that the “vast majority” of women candidates were treated “no differently” than men by voters and the media.⁴⁰

Academic researchers such as Burrell, Dittmar, Hayes, and Lawless do not argue that all sexism is gone from the American political scene. On the contrary, experimental studies conducted in laboratory settings, in which subjects are tested on their views of hypothetical male and female candidates, still show the presence of some forms of classic gender bias. But what the new research shows is that, when people are called upon to make voting decisions in real-life settings, those abstract beliefs about men and women don’t have much meaning. What really matters, in our increasingly divided times, is a candidate’s party and ideology.

In 2014, Kathleen Dolan, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, published an innovative study that made this distinction clear. She surveyed 3,200 people in nine different states, first testing their abstract views of gender by evaluating their reactions to hypothetical male and female candidates, and then returning to see how they evaluated real candidates in their own local races for the U.S. House and Senate. Like Lawless and Hayes, Dolan found little evidence that gender stereotypes came into play in real-world political decisions—political party and accompanying ideology were what mattered the most.⁴¹

“There is a distinction between occasional, albeit high-profile, examples of sexist behavior and systematic gender bias in campaigns,” Hayes and Lawless explained in an op-ed in The Washington Post in May 2016. “Women are under-represented not because of what happens on the campaign trail, but because they are much less likely to run in the first place.”⁴²

Indeed, from 1980 to 2012, women made up only 13 percent of all candidates in primaries for U.S. Congress.⁴³ In light of this, their 19 percent current representation in Congress could be seen as an outsized success.

The privilege of incumbency

How are we to square the new research that tells us that women campaigning for public office are treated and thought of as well as men with the fact that women’s political representation is still so woefully inadequate?

A big part of the answer lies in understanding that there’s an essential caveat to many of the studies that show men and women doing equally well as candidates. Those studies are designed to isolate the effect of gender by comparing men’s and women’s chances at winning legislative office, all else being equal—that is, after factoring out real-life differences so that you can compare “apples to apples” such as incumbents to incumbents.

The problem is that the real-life trajectories of male and female candidates is rarely an apples-to-apples proposition. Take the issue of incumbency, which gives officeholders an enormous advantage at election time. Men were 81 percent of the incumbent members of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016. Incumbents ran in 90 percent of House races that year. And 97 percent of those incumbents won their races.⁴⁴ The same general pattern holds at every level of elected office in the United States.

A gatekeeper system that helps insiders and limits ballot access

This political establishment—call it a system of gatekeepers—determines who is recruited and encouraged to run for office, who gets fundraising resources, and who wins endorsements—in other words, who gets on the ballot and in which races.

Gatekeepers are political power brokers—party leaders, big donors, and key advocacy groups such as unions and chambers of commerce—who identify, recruit, and groom candidates, rally support and funding for them, and confer upon them the blessing of “viability” that signals to other funders and power brokers that they’re the ones to back. These decisions are generally made quickly, in advance of filing deadlines, and the names put forward are generally drawn from a small pool of long-term party faithful. Favored candidates tend to be familiar faces who will predictably uphold party interests and—above all—have easy access to money and the ability to devote considerable personal resources, including time, to their campaigns.⁴⁵

Candidates without personal fortunes or ready access to wealthy donors are deemed not to be viable. Overlooked early on by the powers that be, their unviability often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as groups that fund candidates decide to devote their resources to races that seem easier to win. Not surprisingly, women—and women of color in particular, who generally have lower incomes, lower net worths, and far less social and professional access to big donors—tend to get short shrift in this early “wealth primary”⁴⁶ and are eliminated as players long before voters have a chance to encounter them. Making it through this first voterless primary has proven a particularly enduring problem for women of color, who tend to have the hardest time breaking into the social networks that will bring them the level of private donations they need to convince gatekeepers that their campaigns are viable investments. Even those who eventually rise to star status, such as newly elected Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), often find that they must work twice as hard at the start of their political careers to take on the gatekeeper establishment.⁴⁷

Lack of recruitment and encouragement

All people—men and women alike—are more likely to run for office if asked. Yet as women are less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office,⁵⁰ they especially need to be asked, often repeatedly. And they are less likely to get that encouragement.⁵¹ None of the women interviewed for this paper reported having been actively recruited by the powers that be.

“Oh Lord, no. Not in the slightest,” said Teresa Purcell, who managed Sen. Murray’s first, long-shot race for the U.S Senate in 1992, when asked if party gatekeepers had sought Murray out and supported her early on in that campaign.

A 2014 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reached similar conclusions. After conducting 60 interviews with female candidates, officeholders, and congressional staff members, the researchers found that 51 percent of the female candidates and elected officials said they had never been encouraged by party leaders to run for higher office, and 71 percent said they had never had such encouragement from other power brokers. In fact, a number of women interviewed for this report spoke of subtle dissuasion: for example, party officials telling women not to mount primary challenges to incumbents in their own party. And even when they were given the nod to run, women were often encouraged to compete in difficult races where their own party was more likely to lose.

The high personal and financial costs of a political career

Many local and state-level elected offices pay so poorly that it’s very difficult for people without deep pockets—or a high-earning spouse—to consider a career in politics. Legislators in Texas earn just $7,200 per year, for example, plus a $190 per diem for expenses, while those in New Mexico earn no yearly salary and are provided a daily allowance of up to $163 for official expenses.⁵²

In some states, the problem of low pay is mitigated by the fact that legislative office is considered a part-time job. But that is of little help for those whose jobs don’t permit them much flexibility or who have caretaking responsibilities that make commuting to a statehouse far from home all but impossible. This again keeps candidates without personal wealth, support on the homefront, or career flexibility—disproportionately women—from running in state-level elections and eventually finding their place in the pipeline for higher office.

Combating the structural impediments to women’s progress with structural solutions

Establishing alternative networks

States with long-entrenched and powerful gatekeeper networks, which retain some of the vestiges of the old so-called political machines, such as Pennsylvania, have tended his