Gains slip out the door

Two new women will be sworn in tomorrow as Massachusetts lawmakers, but the atmosphere is less than festive at the Caucus of Women Legislators. At least twice that many experienced female House members will be walking away from the job when their terms expire in November.

More than 50 years of collective history leave the State House when Representatives Shirley Gomes of Cape Cod, Shirley Owens-Hicks of Boston, Anne M. Paulsen of Belmont, and Kathleen M. Teahan of Whitman take their leave of Beacon Hill. Others of their remaining female colleagues are weighing whether to join them.

''We have had a lot of turnover in recent years among men and women," said Representative Lida E. Harkins, a Democrat from Needham and the assistant House majority leader. ''But there are fewer women up here, so their departures have a big impact."

Since 1999, the percentage of women in the Legislature has hovered around 25 percent, even though women make up more than half of the state's population. The arrival tomorrow of newly elected Representatives Denise Provost of Somerville and Virginia Coppola of Foxborough reflects some progress -- Provost fills the House seat vacated by Pat Jehlen, who moves over to the Senate -- but the ''overall numbers have been stagnant," said Erica Mattison, executive director of the Caucus of Women Legislators.

Figuring out why women are so scarce in the corridors of power is neither a new challenge nor one confined to Massachusetts, of course. Simmons College is holding a conference next month on the national underrepresentation of women in politics. What is curious here is that after a period of slow, incremental gains -- in 1987, only 18 percent of the Legislature was female -- progress has stalled.

Part of the problem, Mattison suspects, is that men tend to run for public office earlier in life and then enjoy incumbents' overwhelming odds of reelection. Women often wait until their children are grown to launch political careers, a strategy that leaves less time to build seniority and exercise the clout needed to accomplish much.

That describes Teahan's experience. She ran a successful campaign against a Republican incumbent in 1996 and has earned praise as a member of the Joint Committee on Public Health and the Joint Committee on Elder Affairs. Despite her work on the House Committee on Personnel and Administration, she said, she never did crack ''the ingrained political culture."

Growing up, she said, she learned the value of hard work, but not the niceties of networking. ''I'm torn about leaving," she admitted. ''I have spent my time fighting to improve the quality of life for the people of Massachusetts, and I've seen it deteriorate instead. I'm going to keep fighting, but in another venue, where I might have an impact."

Serving in the Legislature has been an emotional and physical drain, because she never learned to turn the job off. ''When I get home at 8 or 9 o'clock and have six voice mails to answer or I bump into someone at the Stop & Shop with another request, I have no energy left for me. I'm not saying that men don't work hard, too -- they do -- but I never did go off and play golf."

Contrary to popular perception, the job ''is a grind," Harkins said. ''Counting only the hours we are in formal session is like saying police only work when they put the cuffs on. What about the investigations, the patrols, the paperwork?"

The good news, she said, is that some women in the House are talking about running for the Senate this year, and ''we don't mind losing women if they are moving up." She is less sanguine about watching women leave the political arena altogether.

''We started having meetings in my office recently to mentor younger women coming in about the unwritten rules and the pitfalls of this place," she said. ''They have been very well attended. There will be fewer experienced women now to do that mentoring."

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.