Our Other Gender Gap

THIS ELECTION SEASON, ONE CHANGE IN MASSACHUSETTS GOVERNMENT IS attracting little notice. Come January, Beacon Hill will likely hit a six-year low in the number of female legislators. A self-styled citadel of progressive politics, Massachusetts ranks second among states in its percentage of women with at least four years of college, fifth in the percentage of women with managerial or professional positions at work, fifth in women's median annual earnings - and 19th in the percentage of women in its Legislature. And a look at who's on ballots around the state shows that the number will almost certainly drop.

In the session that began last January, 52 women served in the 200-seat state Legislature. That's 26 percent, slightly higher than the national average, and precisely half the percentage of women in the state. Over the last 25 years, the number has climbed steadily, though it hasn't changed much in the last five elections, but even holding at the current level this year is an electoral long shot. Incumbents usually win reelection, but six women are retiring from the House this year (one to run for an open Senate seat), one incumbent lost her primary bid, and another, Representative Deborah Blumer of Framingham, died in October. With just seven women candidates in open races, 44 female incumbents, and an unpredictable write-in race in Framingham, it is highly unlikely that current numbers can be maintained. "The Legislature reflects society, with its debris and progress," says Senator Marian Walsh of West Roxbury, a Democrat who entered the Legislature in 1989. Can the small, probably shrinking, proportion of women on Beacon Hill be attributed to women not running, voters not caring, or the reality that the bargaining and bonding of political life take place somewhere around the ninth hole, where women are less likely to be found? Probably all three.

Not that the women who do make it to Beacon Hill waste much time sighing by the clubhouse gate. For one thing, they're too busy. Women now cochair 13 of the 26 joint committees and have spearheaded successful legislation on everything from smoking bans to pension reform to community investment. And when the Senate elects a new president, possibly as early as January, it will likely be Democrat Therese Murray, who has represented Plymouth and Barnstable for five terms. The only other time a woman held the top position in either chamber was in 1926, when Sylvia Donaldson, a Republican and one of the state's first female representatives, was named speaker of the House - for one day. (Women haven't done that well on the larger political stage, either: If Kerry Healey wins the gubernatorial election, she'll be only the fifth woman ever elected to statewide office in Massachusetts.)

Research shows no clear connection between gender and legislating in any predetermined way, and female lawmakers couldn't accomplish what they do without the cooperation of their male colleagues, since getting nearly anything done in the Legislature requires teamwork. But Carol Donovan, a Democrat and former representative from Woburn, argues that women bring different perspectives and experiences to the State House than men do. "It's things that affect women that men aren't necessarily against, they just don't think about it," she says.

Donovan cites a campaign that she and a handful of other female representatives led in the mid-1990s to pass a law requiring insurers to cover a then-experimental type of bone-marrow transplant as a treatment for breast cancer. "Breast cancer is something the guys don't think about that much," she says. "We reminded them they all have a mother, a wife, a sister, an aunt, a daughter. By the time we finished, we had pink ribbons on every single guy in the Legislature." Wearing a pink ribbon is an easy gesture; the accomplishment was in enlisting the men to recognize that this was not a woman's issue only. "And that," Donovan says, "is why we need to be at the table."

Once women decide to run for the Legislature, they are competitive. Between 2000 and 2004, women running for open Massachusetts House seats (races with no incumbent candidates) won 65 percent of the time, according to Carol Hardy-Fanta, director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In the same period, all but one female incumbent was reelected, she notes. Hardy-Fanta also points out that women of color have done especially well; in Massachusetts, they account for seven of the 11 black and Latino state legislators, male and female. Despite Democratic dominance in the State House, party affiliation doesn't seem to make a big difference on this question; women hold about a quarter of each party's seats.

But women in this state don't run, at least not in large numbers. Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, proposes a trio of requisites for increasing women's representation and power: enough women entering the political pipeline, enough party support for them when they run, and enough opportunities for them to move up once they're in office. Conventional wisdom matters in politics, and one explanation is repeated so regularly that candidates, activists, winners, and losers could all be reading from the same script. Male candidates are said to wake up one morning and decide to run for office, while women wait - until their kids are grown, or they feel qualified, or someone asks them.

RACHEL KAPRELIAN DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE conventional wisdom in 1990. Now 38 and the Democratic representative from Watertown, Kaprelian is a straightforward woman who talks at breakneck speed and seems to be in perpetual motion. Back in 1990, after graduating with a degree in history from Holy Cross, she was living at home when she decided to volunteer for Warren Tolman's first campaign for the House. As she went door to door, she says, "I was astounded by how people would talk about their lives, even hard things, personal things. I didn't realize what a townie I was until I started becoming involved with the issues of the day." At the kitchen table one morning, she mentioned that she would like to volunteer on a City Council race next. "Why don't you run?" was her father's reaction.

Kaprelian replied, "I can't run. What if I lose?"

"You're 22 years old," he told her. "So what?"

A political unknown who looked barely old enough to vote, she mapped out a route, put on her rubber-soled shoes, and spent the summer knocking on doors. Fear, Kaprelian says, is the biggest obstacle for women thinking of running for office. In talking about campaigning back then - and fund-raising now - "discipline" is a word she uses often. She also cites "game theory," which she studied later at the Kennedy School of Government, to explain her drive: "It means when the stakes are so high, you'll do whatever you have to do. I felt at the time, like, I am out there, and I've got to win now."

Kaprelian served two terms on the City Council, positioning herself nicely to win Tolman's seat in 1994 when he moved over to the Senate. This last legislative session, still among the younger representatives, she was appointed to her first leadership position: House chair of the Joint Committee on Municipalities and Regional Government. On a rainy day last April, she pauses at the State House's grand staircase between a speech touting her district's Talking Book program to the Massachusetts Library Association and a quick photo-op with a group of young musicians from Armenia. Upstairs, racetrack workers wrap up a rally with a full-throated rendition of "America the Beautiful." The day before, the Legislature had passed its pioneering healthcare legislation, and she's feeling good. So much legislative work is plugging away without being sure of the outcome, Kaprelian says. "Then, every once in a while," she says with a smile, "you do something significant."

As for the intricacies of gender on Beacon Hill, Kaprelian has seen progress during her 12 years. "When I first got there," she says, "there were some older men who had never dealt with a woman my age except as a secretary." But things are changing. At the time she was first running for office, one of her current aides was in the sixth grade and living in Kaprelian's district. "Her whole reality is that her state rep's a female."

It's not easy getting into the Massachusetts Legislature. It has one of the lowest turnover rates in the country and is dominated by a single party (Republicans hold just 27 of the 200 seats in both houses combined). With so few genuinely competitive races each year, there isn't a lot of pressure on either party to recruit and groom new candidates. This is a hurdle for potential candidates of either gender, but especially for women, who are less connected to the political power structure than men and far less likely to consider running for office to begin with. Because the Legislature is a full-time professional body that, with a $55,000 base salary, pays itself reasonably well, it's a desirable job - and that contributes to its low turnover rate, and possibly to its gender imbalance. Hardy-Fanta points out that in state houses across the country, higher pay seems to be linked to a lower proportion of female legislators. But the pattern in Massachusetts starts at the local level, an important entry point and training ground for all politicians. Hardy-Fanta's latest local figures, from 2004, show that 41 percent of the state's cities and towns had no women on their governing boards and that the number of female lawmakers at the community level is shrinking.

One thing that keeps women out of the pipeline is the challenge of balancing personal and work responsibilities. That tension isn't limited to would-be politicians, or to women, but female legislators say they are more likely than their male counterparts to be running households and caring for children and aging relatives - in addition to doing a job that spills far beyond regular working hours. There is also a public perception that women can't manage families and elective office at the same time. Kaprelian became a mother and earned degrees in law and public administration while in the Legislature. "It's really no different for the men," she says of the time demands. "They just don't get asked about it."

Before deciding to run for office, Linda Dorcena Forry had spent 10 years in state and local government, working for a woman who had proved that it is possible to be a respected public servant and still have a life. Forry had been active in neighborhood and church groups since childhood, and she joined the staff of Charlotte Golar Richie, then a state representative, in 1996, even before she finished her management degree at Boston College. When Golar Richie became chief of housing for the city of Boston, Forry followed her. "This person changed my life," Forry says. "She was an amazing role model for me."

Forry, whose parents emigrated from Haiti, is a sunny woman with a megawatt smile and an innate ability to work a crowd. Her office is so tiny that she and her aide can barely stand in it at the same time. In one of the ironies that keep Massachusetts politics interesting, the 33-year-old progressive Democrat succeeded the longtime speaker of the House, conservative Democrat Thomas Finneran, in a special election. When it became clear that Finneran might have to resign his Dorchester seat during a redistricting controversy, a family friend urged Forry to run, but she wavered. "Men are 20 years old, and they're like, 'That's my seat.' Women, we hesitate. We start thinking, How about if I'm not good? How about if I don't get my points across?" Forry wondered whether she was qualified, and if she could manage with a young son. It was at a Red Sox game - "It's so Boston!" she says, laughing - that Forry, who is expecting a second child in February, decided she could and should run.

Well connected and with her campaign manager living upstairs, Forry ran a competitive race, wooing Haitian voters in Creole and, in Irish neighborhoods, drawing on her husband's deep Dorchester roots. (His family owns Boston Neighborhood News Inc., publisher of the Reporter newspapers, for which he is managing editor.) Now she says of the Massachusetts House, "Of course there's a culture here - it's male-dominated." Forry is eager to find a way to engage other young women, and particularly young women of color, in the political culture. "There was a push that encouraged women to become doctors and lawyers and scientists, and we've had a surge in those numbers. What we need now is a push to get women to be involved in the political realm."

THE MASSACHUSETTS POLITICAL culture Forry describes is legendarily tribal, nasty, and as masculine as a bottle of Paco Rabanne. Female lawmakers, for as long as they are in the minority, have to find their way to work effectively within it. When Stanley Rosenberg, a Democratic senator from Amherst, says that "the women here are every bit as direct, hard-nosed negotiators as the men," he means it as a compliment. But, of course, the question facing female lawmakers is whether they can be more effective by trying to alter the political culture, or by just learning to fit in.

After nearly two decades in the Legislature, Senator Marian Walsh thinks it's some of each. Walsh is part of a pivotal generation, having entered politics midway between the first woman getting elected to statewide office in Massachusetts in 1986 and women nationwide getting fed up enough over the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings in 1993 to run for office - and win - in record numbers. Now 51, Walsh, a woman of formidable intelligence and tenacity, prides herself on being independent- minded, particularly in matters of fairness: lunch-bucket issues such as wage disparities or what she has come to believe is the civil right of gays to marry. Leaning across the desk in her capacious office, she plays with the silver bangle bracelet she has slipped off her wrist and speaks in an even, persuasive voice. "I didn't have the grounding to know how outrageous it was," Walsh says of her first race, in which she took on a longtime incumbent and bucked what she calls the unofficial litmus test for female candidates: She does not support abortion rights, a requisite for endorsement by many women's groups.

Walsh grew up in a family of nine kids where the girls were raised in traditional young-lady decorum but with the less-traditional belief that they could accomplish whatever they wanted. That lesson was burnished at the all-women's Newton College of the Sacred Heart. By 1988, when she first ran for state representative, Walsh had managed Newman Flanagan's successful campaign for Suffolk County district attorney, worked in his law office on criminal reform (including a cutting-edge victim/witness program), earned a law degree from Suffolk University, and graduated from Harvard Divinity School. "I think the advantage I had was that I was underestimated," she says. In 1993, Walsh defeated a one-term male incumbent to move on to the Senate, becoming the first woman to represent her district in both legislative houses. She rose through the ranks to be named assistant majority leader 10 years later.

Like other female legislators, Walsh didn't get where she is by feeling sorry for herself, and she takes pains not to discourage women from running for political office. But she's mindful of the barriers they encounter once they get there. "Sexism is now an odorless gas," she says. It hovers in the air, but no one talks about it. She believes that what is needed for that to change significantly in the Legislature is not just numbers of women, but the kind of women who are willing to push for change.

Mary Rogeness, the second-ranking Republican in the House, would seem inclined to agree with the sentiment, if not necessarily the changes Walsh champions. At a panel discussion of women in politics held at Simmons College in Boston last spring, Rogeness told the largely female audience that women in the Legislature fight an "invisibility factor" but that "power is not given, it's taken." Rogeness, who is 65 and represents Longmeadow, took a path to the Legislature that was typical of the pioneering female lawmakers of her generation: volunteerism in her community, then an elected seat on a school committee, and once her children were grown, a House seat, which she won in 1991. In fact, this kind of work is bred in Rogeness's bones. Her grandmother served for 12 years in the Missouri Legislature, first taking office at the age of 65.

Rogeness describes herself as "reserved," but it's clearly mixed with determination. A Republican and a woman, she is a minority within a minority. "As long as men have to apologize for swearing in your presence, then you're not part of the group," she says. But Rogeness has lately felt at odds with another group she is a part of, the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators. She is involved in a bipartisan discussion about changing the way it functions. Rogeness says that for the caucus to represent and serve all the women in the Legislature and their various viewpoints, decisions should be made not by majority vote but by consensus reached through discussion.

In the last legislative session, the women's caucus arranged occasional informal lunches to give the female legislators an opportunity to talk about their work and strategies. But Democrat Kathleen Teahan, caucus cochair and the representative from Whitman, says these events have been sparsely attended, probably because they're one more thing to fit into an already crowded schedule. "The women may not see it as important," she says, "but they should. The guys do." Teahan is one of the women retiring from the House this year. She tried to recruit several women she thought would be strong candidates for her seat, but failed, she says, to persuade even one. She will be succeeded by a man.

"It's been a wake-up call for us to get strategic," says Hardy-Fanta about the prospect of women's numbers sliding this year. In 2005, the center she runs at UMass helped to form the new Coalition to Recruit and Elect Women. It's now running a two-pronged approach: organizing a group of so-called ambassadors to go into communities and recruit female candidates, and creating an early-alert system to identify seats that are coming open. "With this strategy," Hardy-Fanta hopes, "if women run in all those races, we could change this in one election cycle."