America’s Next President Won’t Be Female, but More Women are Taking Office Than Ever Before
By: Marcus Day
New York — A wave of women in politics is spreading throughout the country. In 2020, more women are expected to run for office than anytime in US history.
There are 584 women running or likely to run for US Congress in 2020. That is compared to 437 two years ago. There are 535 voting seats in congress. A stark increase can be seen in both parties, but most noticeably with the Republicans, who are likely to field 217 candidates. Last ticket, they ran only 96.
This trend is not only federal. As reported by Axios, both houses of Nevada’s legislature women hold a majority of the seats and in New Hampshire and Colorado one chamber is mostly female.
With the 2020 primaries nearing their end, the gender in politics debate has been reinvigorated. The good news was that more women ran for the highest office in the land than ever before, but as we draw closer to the conventions, there are no women left in the race. A temporary medicine is frontrunner Joe Biden’s announcement that he will have a female running mate.
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In the business world, studies are finding better representation as well. A joint study by Mckinsey and Company and LeanIn.Org found promising results. “We see bright spots at senior levels….In the last five years, we’ve seen more women rise to the top levels of companies,” the key researchers said.
The results discovered more women are being hired at the director level and higher than in the past years. Also, senior-level women are being promoted more frequently than men.
According to the Pew Research Center, for the second time in American history women now hold just over half of all payroll jobs in the country.
College-educated women are also working more than educated men for the first time ever. Pew found that in the first quarter of 2019, 29.5 million working women have at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 29.3 million men.
However, women have been the majority of college graduates for over a decade, making this a significant milestone. Women earn roughly 57% of America’s bachelor’s degrees.
Expectedly, there is plenty of hill left to climb. “Yet women continue to be underrepresented at every level. To change the numbers, companies need to focus on where the real problem is. We often talk about the “glass ceiling” that prevents women from reaching senior leadership positions. In reality, the biggest obstacle that women face is much earlier in the pipeline, at the first step up to manager. Fixing this “broken rung” is key to achieving parity,” says writers from the Women in the Workplace project.
McKinsey and LeanIn.org also found that for every 100 men promoted and hired to manager, only 72 women are promoted and hired. Resulting in women remaining in many entry level jobs. They also stated women hold just 38 percent of manager-level positions. When you look at C-Suite levels, the numbers are staggering. Less than 3% of the world’s Fortune 500 CEOs are female.
And as the #MeToo movement illustrated, women don’t only face struggles with promotion, but that workplace harassment continues to be a problem as well. Although there are many statistics that float around, the general consensus is that, at least, over 55% of women in surveys say they have been sexually harassed or have received unwanted sexual advances. Over half of them say these events occurred at work.
The glass ceiling may not be broken, and women will without a doubt continue to face these issues of unequal hiring and harassment in the workplace, but the glass appears to be cracking. Not all of the female candidates have officially declared their campaigns, but regardless, 2020 appears to be more and more female.