Number of women who are state lawmakers inches up to a record
Source: AP
Updated 9:02 AM EST, November 21, 2024
Women will for the first time make up a majority of state legislators in Colorado and New Mexico next year, but at least 13 states saw losses in female representation after the November election, according to a count released Thursday by the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.
While women will fill a record number of state legislative seats in 2025, the overall uptick will be slight, filling just over third of legislative seats. Races in some states are still being called.
“We certainly would like to see a faster rate of change and more significant increases in each election cycle to get us to a place where parity in state legislatures is less novel and more normal,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the CAWP, which is a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.
As of Wednesday, at least 2,451 women will serve in state legislatures, representing 33.2% of the seats nationwide. The previous record was set in 2024 with 2,431 women, according to the CAWP. The number of Republican women, at least 852, will break the previous record of 815 state lawmakers set in 2024. “But still, Republican women are very underrepresented compared to Democratic women,” Debbie Walsh, director of the CAWP, said.
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