Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sat behind President Biden during his first speech to a joint session of Congress on April 28 — representing the first time two women held such important and high-ranking political offices. Even after such a historic moment, the reality is women remain vastly underrepresented in government. According to experts from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), this is especially true in local government, with women holding fewer than one-third of seats in all municipal governments nationwide.
Contradicting a long-standing myth that women are more represented in government at the local level in many communities, reporter Barbara Rodriguez of nonprofit newsroom The 19th wrote that new data from CAWP shows that “nationwide, women hold [just] 30.5% of municipal offices, including mayoral offices, city councils and other similar bodies. That is comparable to women’s representation in state and federal offices: They make up 30.9% of state legislatures and 26.5% of Congress.”
The new report from CAWP was one of the first times women’s political power had been collected and analyzed on the local level.
