Women: The election’s real winners

last updated 8 January 2015

The 2012 election will be remembered as the “Year of the Woman,” said Halimah Abdullah in CNN.com. When the next Congress convenes in January, it will have 20 female senators—up from 17 today—the most in U.S. history. Those new lawmakers include pioneers like Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts’s first female senator, and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay senator. With reproductive rights at issue, the votes of women also helped to put President Obama back in the White House: He won the support of 67 percent of single women and 55 percent of all women. Just as important as the women who won, though, were the “antediluvian” men who lost, said Margaret Talbot in NewYorker.com. Republicans Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost Senate races in Missouri and Indiana, respectively, after giving offensive explanations of why women impregnated during rape should be compelled by law to give birth. If there really was a war on women, “it looks like the women are winning.”

Excuse me if I don’t “break out the champagne,” said Abby Rapoport in Prospect.org. “This whole crazy idea that women can govern” might be catching on, but gender parity remains a distant dream. In state legislatures, women still hold only about 25 percent of the seats, while the number of female governors just fell from six to four (out of 50). And what’s missing from all this girl-power talk is a mention of “how poorly the Republican women fared,” said Susannah Shakow in Politico.com. Republican women simply don’t run for Congress in the same numbers as Democratic women; this year just 109 Republican women sought House seats, compared with 190 Democratic women. So long as the GOP remains an old boys’ club, women will remain a minority in state capitals and in Washington.

Still, this year’s election could mark a real turning point, said Ann Friedman in NYMag.com. Studies show that “when one woman is elected to the Senate, the chances of another woman being elected go way up.” Voters get comfortable seeing high-profile women like Warren in power, and ambitious women have more role models to emulate. Someday, when women hold roughly 50 percent of the seats at all levels of government, we’ll be able to declare the Year of the Woman. “But if we’ve made it that far, I’m pretty sure we probably won’t be using the label anymore.”