Orange County has a higher percentage of women elected to federal, state and city offices than national averages for those levels of government.
Overall, women hold roughly four in 10 of the county’s elected positions, a Register analysis shows. And women currently hold a majority of local House, state Assembly and school board seats.
Women’s History Month is a good time to celebrate that progress, said Ada Briceño, president of the Democratic Party of Orange County. But she said it’s also an opportunity to question why so many gaps in equal representation remain.
“We make up 50% of the population, we have higher voter turnout than men. But we are significantly underrepresented in elected office, and also supporting roles, such as commissions,” Briceño said.
For example, women hold slightly more than one in three city council seats in Orange County. And at the water board level, women hold fewer than one in five seats.
Also, 11 of 95 local boards with elected officers — including three city councils, four water boards and four special districts — have no women at all, while another 20 have just one female among their five to seven members. By comparison, only two of those boards are all-female and only eight have only one man.
Discussions about the issue raises tricky questions about equal representation vs. so-called “identity politics.” It also forces some to ask if anything can, or should, be done to level the playing field.
In recent decades, data shows that Democrats have done better than Republicans when it comes to boosting female representation, though both parties include high-profile women. Democrats also are more likely to identify gender-specific barriers that they say are still holding women back, such as carrying a heavier share of the workload at home.
But world events, such as the pandemic, and stepped-up efforts to attract female candidates for every level of government, have conspired to prompt more women than ever to seek the backing of the GOP and Democratic parties.
Women might be driven to get involved by different issues that have more to do with politics than gender — such as limiting restrictions around COVID-19 on the right and limiting restrictions around women’s reproductive rights on the left. But, regardless, Randall Avila, executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County said the results are encouraging.
“I really feel like a lot of women feel empowered and ready to run for office.”
Progress in fits and starts
The rise of women in political offices has been a story of steady (but slow) growth, punctuated by a couple of big gains in short periods.
In Congress, the number of women was growing by about 1 percentage point each election cycle from 1971 through the early 1990s, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.
Then came 1992.
That was the year women around the country watched on television as an all-male Senate committee grilled attorney Anita Hill about her sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
Walsh said the spectacle of those hearings — which many derided as both sexist and racist — helped turn the 1992 elections into a political “Year of the Woman.” Overall, women saw their representation in Congress jump from 6% to 10% in one election cycle.
Over the next three decades, the growth of female representation slipped back to the slow, steady pace of prior years. Then came the 2018 midterm election, when backlash against President Donald Trump’s victory prompted women to vote and, in many cases, run for office. That year, women jumped from 21% to 24% of Congress, then jumped again in 2020 to a record-high 27% today.
In Orange County, the pattern has been similar, though the numbers are slightly closer to equitable.
Women hold 57% of the the local House seats, twice the national average, and 42% of the state Senate and Assembly seats, also higher than the national average for state legislative districts, according to data tracked by the CAWP researchers at Rutgers.
And while woman make up less than 31% of elected municipal positions in all U.S. cities with more than 10,000 people, they hold 36% of city council roles in Orange County’s 33 cities that meet that criteria. (Only Villa Park, which has fewer than 6,000 residents, is excluded.)
Much of that progress has come in the last decade, Avila noted.
In 2010, women held just two of Orange County’s congressional seats. Both were Latina Democrats who happened to be sisters: Linda and Loretta Sanchez. Today, women hold four of seven seats, and they’re evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.
In 2010, Republican Diane Harkey was the only woman holding any of Orange County’s eight Assembly seats. Today, females hold four of seven local Assembly seats, with an even split between Republicans and Democrats.
Impacts on policy
Experts on both sides of the political aisle say the increase in women in office has had a positive impact on policy decisions.
“Women are consensus builders, problem solvers and know how to get things done,” said Rep. Young Kim, R-La Habra, who was one of the first Korean American women elected to Congress in 2020.
“Our country can benefit from having more women perspectives at the table in the halls of government at local, state and federal levels.”
There is research to back Kim’s statement.
In surveys her organization has conducted, asking state legislators why they ran for office, Walsh said women office holders are more likely to talk about solving specific problems while men are more likely to talk about their longstanding interesting in politics.
Walsh said it makes sense, then, that women have played key roles in working across the aisle and helping to break up the partisan gridlock that was stalling several key bills, such as GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine helping to negotiate the end of the 2018 federal government shutdown, or Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona co-negotiating the 2021 infrastructure bill.
Aside from problem-solving skills, Briceño said women bring real-life experiences to their elected jobs that tend to focus on issues that directly affect voters — things like healthcare, child care, pay equity, education and reproductive rights.
Partisan gaps
Recognizing the benefit of those viewpoints — and a desire to win over women voters — Orange County’s GOP and Democratic parties each have programs specifically to support women who are interested in running for office.
For Republicans, Avila pointed to the Bergeson Series, named for Marian Bergeson a Republican from Newport Beach who was the first California woman to serve in both the Assembly and state Senate. For Democrats, Briceño said it largely happens through the party’s many voting groups and clubs.
Unlike at the national level, where women in office are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, female representation in Orange County is essentially equal across party lines at the state and federal office levels. An exception is the state Senate, where the only woman currently holding one of the five local seats, Sen. Pat Bates, is a Republican.
But at the county and city levels, most of the categories where women are underrepresented also happen to be levels of government where most office holders are Republicans. From the county Board of Supervisors to city councils to water districts and special districts, most Orange County seats are likely to be held by Republicans who are likely to be male.
While the local GOP touts the number of Republican women in office, Avila said the party doesn’t recruit candidates or elect them because they are women. Instead, he said he believes the increase in female office holders is a “great thing that has happened naturally.” And Avila said he does not hear from female candidates or office holders in the party about gender-specific barriers to becoming a politician.
Fountain Valley Mayor Pro Tem Kim Constantine, who is a Republican and the only woman on her city council, agreed.
“I never think of myself as a woman,” she said. “I’m just someone who serves my community. And I’m so thrilled to do so.”
Meanwhile, there are more female office holders, and more Democrats, in O.C.’s federal, state Assembly and school board offices.
Briceño said that’s because Democrats intentionally and openly recruit more women to run for office, to bring more female representation to the table.
Leading local Democrats, such as Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, talk about the unique barriers that women and single parents face in running for office. Porter, in fact, has pushed legislation aimed at making it easier for both groups to join the political process.
It’s not that Democrats, overall, are more likely to vote for women, Briceño argued. Instead, she said, women are more likely to turn out to vote, and they tend to vote for Democrats. So with the party backing more female candidates, and female voters backing more Democrats, the number of female Democrats continues to surge ahead at the local, state and national levels.
Looking forward
Though her organization tracks the number of women running for office in every election cycle, Walsh said it’s too early to know if there will be more female candidates this year than in recent elections because candidate filing periods remain open in many states. But, she said, it is known that 11 women on the House side have already said they’re not running for re-election, which means it’ll take more than that number of women to win if representation is to grow closer to equal.
In Orange County, three of the most competitive local Congressional races include female incumbents, with men the leading challengers against Reps. Kim, Porter and Michelle Steel.
Issues triggered by the pandemic also pose unique barriers for women who might want to run for office, Briceño noted, since women often are the primary caregivers for both children and elderly family members. The threat of the pandemic has created uncertainty that, she said, prompted a couple women she’d been talking to about running for office to sit out this cycle.
Then there’s the hyper-partisan and at times violent rhetoric that’s invaded so many local school board, city council and county board meetings.
Martha McNicholas, who rose from PTA mom to president of the Capistrano Unified School District board, said she never thought until recently about how the fact that her board is one of just two in the entire county to be entirely female — and how that might make the board a particular target for hostility. But the question came up after one female board member abrupty resigned her seat two weeks ago in large part over harassment from the public, which McNicholas said can skew misogynistic.
“I’m wondering, being an all-female board, does that make people think they can intimidate us more, and that it’s OK to yell at us?” she said. She’s tried to keep careful order and “put up a strong face,” but said she worries about how the rise in public anger might dissuade many rational people, and women in particular, from running for office.
Walsh said there are several unknown factors that might still change the ratio of women in office, this year and going forward.
In June, the Supreme Court is expected to hear a key abortion rights case that could determine the fate of Roe v. Wade. While Walsh noted that the ruling will come after the filing deadlines to run for federal office, meaning it can’t prompt women to run at that level, it might lead more women to run for local offices. And it’s an issue that definitely could prompt women to vote in November.
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