A record number of women will take seats in state legislatures next year, and in many states, those legislatures will be gaveled into session by women leaders.
At least 95 women are slated to hold senior leadership posts — House speakerships, Senate presidencies and majority or minority leader positions — according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A Pluribus News analysis of elections that have already taken place shows 83 women have won top leadership posts.
Women will serve as House speakers in 10 states, including Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington.
Hawaii Rep. Nadine Nakamura (D) will be the first woman to hold the speaker’s gavel in her state. In Minnesota, where the two parties hold equal numbers of seats in the state House, Reps. Melissa Hortman (D) and Lisa Demuth (R), the respective party leaders, are expected to hammer out a power-sharing agreement that could see both women wielding the speaker’s gavel.
Four states — Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire — will have women serving as Senate presidents. New Hampshire Sen. Sharon Carson (R) will be the first Republican woman to hold that post, following three Democratic women who have served as Senate presidents since the turn of the century.
In many states, the leadership table will be dominated by women. Colorado, Illinois, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont all have legislative chambers in which both the majority leader and minority leader are women. Three of those states — New Hampshire, New Mexico and Oregon — are led by women governors.
The number of states where women hold senior leadership positions is set to grow next year to at least 39.
States in the Deep South are laggards: Leadership positions in legislatures in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas are all held by men. So are all the leadership posts in blue Connecticut and unicameral Nebraska, where the nonpartisan legislature does not have majority or minority leaders.
Nationally, women will hold at least 2,451 state legislative seats, with about three dozen contests involving women yet to be decided. That represents 33.2% of the 7,386 state legislative seats in America, a high water mark for female representation, according to the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University, albeit only a modest gain from the previous election cycle.
Democratic women outnumber Republican women by a nearly two-to-one margin — 1,579 to 852 — according to CAWP’s figures.
Debbie Walsh, who directs the Rutgers center, said the growing number of women in public office is a testament to the many years of foundations that parties and groups have laid to attract women to public office.
“The kinds of gains that we have seen happen because there’s intentionality and work being done to make sure that there are more women in positions of power and leadership,” Walsh said in an interview. But, she said: “In general for women’s representation, it’s kind of a stasis year.”
Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico will have majority-women legislatures, the first time that three states have reached that mark concurrently. Women will hold majorities in state Senates in Arizona and California, and half the seats in the Oregon House, which will be run by Speaker Julie Fahey (D) and Minority Leader Christine Drazan (R).
Those legislators will work with a record number of women governors next year — though that record is set to be short-lived. Delaware Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long (D) will briefly serve as governor after Gov. John Carney (D) resigns to become mayor of Wilmington, briefly creating 14 women-run states. Hall-Long will be replaced by Gov.-elect Matt Meyer (D) a few days later.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) will briefly overlap with the first two Democrats to lead minority caucuses in the House and Senate, Rep. Liz Larson (D) and Sen. Erin Healey (D), before Noem resigns to take office as Secretary of Homeland Security.