Chapter 4: Structural Barriers and Opportunities

I’m a regular middle-class person. I didn’t have the luxury of mortgaging my future. I didn’t have a home that I could put up for collateral to run this race, right? I was working full-time when I launched my campaign. …The only reason I could run is because I didn’t have student loans. That was one thing that was maybe a separator from me [and] my peer groups but I am not wealthy [and] well-connected.”

I’ve realized that this is something that’s going on nationwide, that if you want to be governor that often comes hand-in-hand with enormous wealth. I’m not enormously wealthy. …I never considered being governor because I just didn’t feel like I could come up with the dollars that were necessary. Not that I couldn’t do [the job of being governor], alright. You put me in the seat [and] I’ll work hard. I could do it. But I just don’t think that I could accumulate that sort of wealth.”

It takes more effort to get a woman to run for office because we’re overwhelmed and worried about finances. I mean, it was the first thing I brought up. I was like, ‘I can’t put a dime to my campaign, so how are we doing to do this?’”

Another barrier that these women [candidates], especially women of color [candidates], are coming up against is a lot of them don’t come from historical wealth, don’t come from generational wealth, [and] have families [that] can’t be contributing all of the time.”

In a way…the most hard-fought races in the city of Chicago are aldermanic races. And because it’s harder for women to raise money and because women are less likely to be in professions where they have rich friends, it’s harder for women to have the financial foundation that they need to run for these offices. It’s still true that for any of us in public life [that] most of our financial supporters are men. And particularly for those local offices, it makes it harder for women [candidates].”

I think one [of the barriers to women’s political representation is] access to resources. Being able to fund campaigns, especially the way they’re being financed today when you have independent expenditures flying in, and it’s just getting more expensive to run for elected office. And again, when we’re talking about women being paid less, that means women have access to less resources, access to less assets. And it just kind of immediately creates a barrier for our ability to raise our own capital to finance campaigns.”

Money is the commodity that people use to judge [electability]. …Candidates always have to prove themselves…male and female. And when you go out there and you say you want to run then part of the way you prove yourself is to get endorsements and part of [doing that] is [showing] how much money [you raised].”

Donors want to invest in people that they think are going to win. And donors don’t think women are going to win. …And so I think that is the biggest obstacle facing women, facing every candidate, really facing women is how do they convince the donor base that they can win.”

Women have to write checks. …When I put together donor call sheets for my clients, there [are] three women, maybe four, in my top 150 donors. And if you want to grow influence, all money is is access. It’s access and influence. It is not quid pro quo. It’s not any of that. It’s to open a door. And women are not giving. …Women have got to give, and that’s how they are going to start to get into these circles and start to break through. …If you want to affect political change and gain influence, it’s writing checks.”

Over and over, we see who controls the campaign dollars and who gives the campaign dollars is often men. I talk a lot about how in my household before I got elected – maybe even still a little bit now – my husband made all of the decisions about who we gave to politically and I made all the charitable decisions, right? And…so if I left that to him then does that mean he’s choosing mostly men? I mean I don’t think so. We kind of share some of those values, but in some households it may mean that, right?”

I would be lying if I told you there probably isn’t some slight bias with women [candidates] among [the donor class]. If the donor class is 80% male, then it’s not surprising we keep ending up with male candidates.”

There’s a reason why wealthy people who often are men and not responsible for childcare are the ones who often run for office. …Oftentimes when people are considering running, they are not seriously considering the personal ecology that they are going to need to maintain in order to be successful as an elected official. Thinking about running for state House in Georgia, if you are a millionaire and you have assets and you have childcare and all of that, you absolutely can go work for $17,000 a year. Of course, right? You cannot do that if you are working class, if you are actively involved in rearing children, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so what kind of life do you need, what kind of support do you need in order to sustain a career as an elected official? And even on the federal level, you need support in ways that wealth makes easier [and] gives you access to.”

I would say the two pivotal [reasons that I left the legislature] were our youngest daughter was getting ready to go to college and our promise was to pay for their college so they could come out debt free. And financially in our state we only get paid $8,000 every two years. And so I had taken all my savings from my corporate [job] that I had accumulated in the almost 20 years at MGM and that’s what I lived off of so I could be a full-time legislator. But with no pay, right, so I used all my savings to be able to do that. And then obviously that has an end point, it wasn’t endless. And when our daughter made the decision that…she wanted to go to college then we had to relook at our finances and it just wasn’t penciling out.”

Especially for state government workers, the pay that you’re going to get [in the Illinois legislature] versus the pay that you would get working in the private sector, especially if you’re a young female or a young minority coming out of law school, [is significantly different]. [Do] you really…want to come down to Springfield and work for not very much money, have to travel, all that, or [if] you can just work for a law firm in Chicago, what are you gonna do?”

I have been very lucky that [with] the work that I’ve done as a lawyer, I was able to nestle away enough money to survive for not practicing law for two years. Who can quit their job for two years to run for office? I mean, that’s crazy. Like saying it out loud is just ridiculous. But, you know, but that’s how I feel about the last five years [of running for and serving in office]. I really do feel like it was my tour of duty. [Interview conducted in February 2023.]”

One of the things that also happened to me, as I was running [for city council] was…the television station [I worked for] sent it all the way up to the corporate office and I had to resign from doing that work to run. And then the day after I was elected, my radio job let me go. …So that was my introduction to really being elected. You’re going to pay the cost and I paid the ultimate sacrifice because I remember telling my mother, I said, ‘You know, mom, I did not expect to have to worry about my community and myself. Now I have to worry about me and figure out how I’m going to survive on $12,000 a year. How am I going to pay rent? And do the things that I need to do in order to make my community successful without being selfishly worried about myself?’”

One of the other barriers that I saw in running [for office], talking about the economic status and all of that, was the financial aspect of running. So…legislators only make $45,000 a year. …With my husband working for the state, I have always been the breadwinner in our family and so that was something that was really scary to me. …I knew that we would be taking a substantial pay cut [from] me quitting my job and going to run for office. …I remember telling my boss, ‘I can’t run for office because I can’t afford to do that.’ …My boss allowed me to keep my job. And so I worked for him nine months out of the year…and…then the other I just kind of pieced together what I [could] do for him during that time [the legislature was in session]. And so the flexibility that he allows and still paying me was able to break that barrier [to officeholding] down but a lot of people can’t do that.”

The hardest thing to overcome has been getting good women to run. …The risks feel so high, particularly for mothers. Because it is no joke, it is a grueling pace and it requires a lot of time away from your family. And some women have very helpful, intuitive partners, and some women, they feel like things are going to fall apart if they are not around. True or untrue, that’s for them to kind of flush out.”

When you run for office, one of the biggest barriers I think for women to even step up is family, right? And so we think about, should I run? I have small children. That’s a really massive consideration. Whereas you think a guy for ten seconds gives it more than that thought of whether or not they should run for office because of how it would impact their family? The expectation is, ‘My wife is going to pick up that slack and she’s going to be okay with that,’ right? It’s not like, ‘I’m going to be away from my kids, not going to get to see them every night. How’s that going to impact them?’ These feelings of massive guilt that come with stepping up for office – I felt it even though I talk about how important it is to not be that way. I mean, I’m human, right? I’m a mother.”

The way in which we do the [political] work is centered around humans that aren’t responsible for other humans. Meaning I’m a mother, I have three children. I have a 13, 11, and eight year-old. And I was a mother of two when I started this work…and then I had my third child on the job. …If I didn’t have my family and the women in my family, there’s no way in the world that I would be here because it would have been impossible. I couldn’t have afforded childcare because it would have been cost prohibitive even for me. I wouldn’t have been able to travel. I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on learning the job. …My aunt didn’t just take care of my children. She made sure that my family was intact, and that’s an important component that’s never really explored which is why you don’t always see us in these spaces [of political leadership] because why would you? There’s nothing to support us being in these spaces as people who have more accountability and responsibility.”

On the staff side, these are jobs where you’re working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. You can’t do that with two kids at home. You can’t necessarily do that. And you can’t travel from Chicago to Springfield every week for six months a year. So these [legislative staff positions] become jobs that are mostly held by younger women who don’t have children and then they end up getting married or they end up having children and then they leave the job and go do something else. …Our state Capitol doesn’t have a daycare. That’s crazy, right? …We didn’t have a lactation room until I came back from maternity leave and bitched about the fact that I had nowhere to pump. …It’s hard to build that bench [of women staffers]…if you don’t have the institutional support to help you do those kinds of things.”

I was the first commissioner at my Metropolitan Water Reclamation Board in 130 years to have a baby while in office. I didn’t know that when I had the baby. I found that out as I had to navigate certain things. And they were like, ‘We’ve never dealt with this before,’ so even things like maternity leave, they were like, ‘We don’t know because we’re technically part-time employees so we’re not FMLA eligible.’ …I didn’t know if I was getting paid until they paid me.”

I carried this childcare bill in the Senate. [Representative] Jehan [Gordon-Booth] had it in the House. We tag-teamed this. We negotiated together. It was intense and hard and all the rest of that stuff. And her daughter, Jianna, …was maybe three. And so we had her in the capitol. And so here I am babysitting Jianna in the Senate chamber because her mother is running a childcare bill and doesn’t have childcare. There’s no daycare center in the capitol. …There are close places, [but]…does it make it easy for young women who are having babies to actually hold office?”

When I finally said, ‘Yes, I’m going to [run for office],’ I also told my [staff], ‘I need you all to remember that I’m a mother. I need you all to remember that I need time with my child. So we are going to have to figure out a childcare situation that includes my child into all of this because I can’t just not see my child. That’s not an option.’ And because of that we created a kid’s area in our campaign office and we had childcare every weekend when we were knocking on doors so that when I came back for lunch I could be with my child. And for other women that wanted to participate in the campaign [and]…be able to leave their kids in childcare — they could go knock on doors and organize or participate in the campaign in whatever way they wanted to. That experience…informs the way in which I structure my ward office because when you come into my ward office the first thing that you have is the kid’s area where, when parents come in with their kids, they know that there’s space for them.”

One thing we started doing at our office is we have a kid’s room. And so employees can bring their kids to the office if they need to. And [there are] lots of toys there. There’s TV, Disney Plus, books and that, right? But I’ve been working in this [advocacy] space for quite some time and never did have a manager sit here and say, ‘Well, okay you have kids. How can I, as your manager, help you be the best version of yourself professionally but also personally?’ And I think being a woman and being a mom has made me think about that a lot.”

I see [the Allegheny County Party Democratic Committee] as becoming, in too many instances, kind of a gatekeeping organization. …It’s become this really incestuous club where people who had been able to amass some sort of influence – I don’t even like to always call it power, but an influence or a proximity to power – they are able to use it to control the politics of their very hyper-localized communities. And the problem with that is that what it does is it ends up perpetuating this kind of phenomenon where our elected officials don’t always reflect their communities. …The people who have the relationships with those committees, who have those pre-existing networks, what they do is they use them to shut out newcomers, to shut out new blood. And they convince newcomers that this is an endeavor that they shouldn’t take up because you’ll be shunned or you will be curb-stomped. But it’s a deterrent. It had served as a deterrent for so long, and then we came and ran, seeing that for exactly what is was, and just making a plan to go around it. And what we were able to do is really lay bare their shortcomings, some of their blind spots, and also some of their weaknesses. And [we were] able to build an apparatus or build infrastructure to counteract it.”

From what I have seen the candidates that do well have been people that have been volunteering or supporting campaigns or been involved in these party spaces for many years. But then it makes it harder for people that haven’t done that level of party-affiliated work to be successful. And I’ve seen…so many times where we have a candidate that is a very authentic advocate for her community. She’s a woman of color, grew up in the district wanting to run for office and is in a primary against a white man who has been in the Democratic Party for ten years, serves as a leader in the party and, of course, he’s going to win that primary because no one knows this woman even though she’s a more authentic representative of the district, right? No one knows who she is. She can’t raise the money. She can’t get through the fray of election season. And so, of course, we end up with people who lose because they don’t have the notoriety of being through the party. So I think our vision [at Asian American Advocacy Fund] is very much [to] try to identify and cultivate more of those people that are those authentic representatives of their communities and give them a chance to actually fight in those sorts of situations where they may be fighting a party person for a primary.”

I’ve been in the Senate for 12 years and have become one of the highest-ranking Republican women within the state. Throughout that entire time, we’ve talked about what needs to be done to get more women into the party. My female colleagues and I have articulated suggestions to accomplish that goal. However, it can be frustrating at times to see the pace at which real positive change happens. [Interview conducted in May 2022.]”

[Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick] had a vision to make sure women had a place at the table. And so she made sure that we, the women that had gotten elected, had leadership positions. And so that’s how we ended up chairing committees and holding leadership roles in such a small amount of time because she was pivotal. And now we have a majority-woman legislature and she was part of that cornerstone that made it happen.”

So certainly I bring my entire lived experience thus far into every meeting with me. I bring the lens of a young woman from Philadelphia who grew up in a single-parent home, who has had and continues to have many positive women in my life starting with my mother and moving from out into the circle. And the most compelling thing is that I think many times when a lot of decisions have been made about schools, about women’s bodily autonomy, about childcare and so much more, when I’m at the budget table with the governor and other leaders, I am mindful that there has never been a woman to sit at that table and fight for these things. So I am able to use my own leadership style, which sometimes entails humor, to just remind the men at the table…how serious these needs are and how we have a responsibility to move sooner [rather] than later. [Interview conducted in August 2022 while McClinton still served as House Minority Leader.]”

In the Republican Party, there’s not that many [electoral] opportunities simply given the map. I mean it’s really, really hard. …But it’s hard to get, or has been hard to get, women, much less women of color or ethnic women, to run in the Republican primary because there’s just not that many opportunities.”

I know that Democratic leaders especially hate to hear us say things like this, but I can’t do anything other than empower other people to see how little I can do [as a Democrat serving with a Republican supermajority]. That’s kind of the position that you’re in. [Interview conducted in February 2022 before Bell left the legislature.]”

I think local government is becoming more and more of an option for women in Oklahoma. …Most of the cities are nonpartisan. …I think there are people finding that maybe a state legislative race is out of reach because of the nature of the district. And so they are turning to opportunities that are more accessible maybe.”

Anytime you have a statewide election, there’s a lot of jockeying up and down the ballot for people running for Congress, people running for statewide higher office. And so all of those vacancies where we elected new women in 2017 were vacancies created when people resigned from the legislature to run for higher office.”

If we looked at the last 20, 30 years, [a contributor to the increase in women’s political representation] has really been term limits. Term limits allow for old leaders to move out and new leaders to come in. And with that has led to the significant increase and diversity in the legislature.”

[Term limits] also mean…when women do get to these high levels [of leadership], when someone like Barbara Buckley, who [was] the speaker of the Assembly, when someone like Maggie Carlton is chairing Ways and Means, these powerhouse women then term out and they are not there to mentor other young women.”

I think [term limits are] one of the reasons why our numbers [of women] have stayed pretty stagnant over the years. Because we have had several very experienced, obviously, legislators, who are women, term out. And they’re not always replaced by women. Usually they’re not, I would say, and so I think that [term limits] definitely contributed to our relatively low rate of female [state legislative] representation in Oklahoma. …When I first was elected I thought, ‘Wow 12 years, that’s a really long time,’ but now that 12 years has come and gone it hasn’t really seemed like that long of a time. And I now feel like I’m sort of getting kicked out just when I feel like I have a really good handle on all the ins and outs of things. [Interview conducted in June 2022 before Virgin left the legislature.]”

So specific to Illinois I will also say [that] this administration…in terms of the governor’s office and his Cabinet positions, more than 50% of the appointments are women. And that matters significantly. …The fact that this governor has surrounded himself and appointed the women…directly impacts the experience of women and families and communities, whether you are a consumer of budget items or you work for the State of Illinois.”

What we found is in the last appointments [to vacant seats]…that’s one way to get a minority or a woman started [in elective office]. …The easiest way to do it is through the appointment process when there’s an opening. Whether it be school board, city council, wherever, because then once they’re there, they are the incumbent. That gives them access to contacting lobbyists. That gives them access to raising money. That gives them a foot in the door, at least, [to] choose to run the next time —they have opportunity. And I think if anybody analyzed that, you’d start to see that the appointment process could be a door opening for women and minorities to get into politics.”

One [of the contributors to gains in women’s political representation] is a demographic shift in Georgia [where] we have a lot of people who have moved into metro Atlanta. So you see the gains that women have made in the legislature [are] particularly in the metro Atlanta-area seats. And I think that’s been brought on because our metro Atlanta demographic growth is really focused, and has been, on a little bit more of a higher income and really well-educated individuals who have moved in. And I think they have found some comfort level with different voices being involved in our political sphere.”

I think the biggest challenges facing Native American, Black, and Hispanic women in the state have to do with just the lack of very many opportunities [in] any districts where they can truly be competitive. And from what I’ve been following in 2020 with the new districting that’s been going on in Oklahoma right now, it’s getting worse. …There just aren’t that many opportunities at the state level for districts that would have large, active, engaged minority populations to be competitive. [Interview conducted in January 2022.]”

I think redistricting had a lot to do with [the influx of women running for office and winning] because when you redraw the lines over the last two times – not this last time but the two times before then – and you have those significant types of changes in districts and you have more Democratic seats available and women tend to fit into those seats a little bit better. I think that’s huge.”

Georgia is, what I think, at a significant demographic crossroads. Certainly, women of color are much more engaged than men of color in the state of Georgia. There [are] more Latinas registered to vote than there are Latinos. And women are engaging in ways that are substantive to help build a better community together. But I think part of the challenge is [that] we are in a system that the deck is stacked against substantial wins for our communities. We have a redistricting, gerrymandered process that packed in [and] diluted minority communities to help preserve white male dominance in the Georgia legislature.”

A lot of our local party organizations have women involved but they haven’t always promoted or encouraged women to run for a lot of those local offices. That is shifting a little bit more as we get some women in some local Republican county party organizations where they are promoting that. But historically that’s been the case. It was definitely male-dominated and thus they kind of selected their friends to run for a lot of those offices.”

I would say the lobby corps that lobbies the legislature… [is] still largely dominated by white men because corporations are still dominated by white men and those lobbyists are comfortable hiring people that look like them and people that talk like them and people that act like them. …I think [it] puts our female-majority legislature in a strange spot because [women legislators] are then not taken as seriously on the policy front or they are [viewed as] too progressive because they are advocating for two weeks of paid leave instead of one or whatever it is, right? That is a real argument that we had in the legislature with a female majority saying we want paid leave, and the corporate white lobbyists are like, ‘Why?’”

I’m just still very skeptical because I look around a lot of these campaigns and I still see it filled with a lot of white men — a lot of white men’s money, a lot of white men who are consultants and candidates. And like I said, I don’t think it really changes…just organically with generations. [It does not change until] there’s a real commitment on the part of campaigns…and those who help find and recruit people to say, ‘We’re going to commit to trying to elect X number of women, period.’ …You have to be deliberate and that infrastructure needs to be built.”

I think it’s…vitally important that women are here [as political consultants]. …I ran a business with my husband and he is as feminist as could be and checks his white male privilege all the time, but he is still a white male that struggles no matter what with that internalized patriarchal point of view. And that’s why it’s so important that we’re in these positions. And so I think that it [has] improved and I think even on the Republican side, [the number of women consultants has] improved like over the last decade.”

I think women truly need allies standing up…and being advocates. Governor Pritzker does a good job of this in lifting people up in different positions. But I think making sure more and more men, especially white men, understand that privilege and have women’s backs the way women have their backs. That’s, I think, where you’re going to see some real change. So that seems to be what’s needed most.”

[Former Assembly Speakers] Jason Frierson and Steve Yeager — you have two men that recognize the importance of having strong women in those positions [of political power] and they’re not just paying lip service. They are doing it by their actions in who they’re appointing, who they are making chairs of committees, and really including that voice in the upper decision-making.”

So for me, I had male colleagues that were extremely supportive of women running [for political office]. So one of the people that was instrumental in my success after the primary and the runoff was Representative Marcus McIntyre. And he was just always very vocal about the fact that women bring a different perspective to the capitol, they bring a more holistic view than men. And so for me it was very much the fact that I had males who were encouraging people to vote for women.”

I don’t want to set anything backwards or make it sound bad. But women aren’t going to solve this problem by themselves. They need all the folks who are in the establishment who are kind of the old white men, [they] have to welcome them in and bring them in and find opportunities. Because if not, it’s hard to do yourself if you’re on the outside. It’s hard to get on the inside.”