For Immediate Release
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Contact Information
Representation 2020: Cynthia Terrell, 301-270 4616, ct@fairvote.org
The Ocean State’s lagging Performance: Gender Parity in Elected Office in Rhode Island
Representation 2020 has assigned all 50 states a Gender Parity Score as part of its Gender Parity Index. A
state’s Gender Parity Score measures women’s recent electoral success at the local, state and national
level on a scale of 0 — if it had no women in any of the offices used to create the index — to 100, if
women held all such offices. Gender parity in elected office is defined as women and men being equally
likely to hold the majority of seats. No state has ever achieved a parity score of 50, while 22 states have
scores of 15 or less.
The median Gender Parity Score for all 50 states was 15.84 at the end of 2013, up from 9.45 in
1993. Representation 2020 researched the rate of change between 1993 and 2013 and projected the
following, if the same pace of change was to continue:
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Women will reach parity in 71 years in the US Senate and 89 years in the US House
Women will reach parity in state legislatures in 139 years
Women will reach parity in statewide executive offices in approximately 900 years
At the end of 2013, Rhode Island’s Gender Parity Score was 14.7, meaning that Rhode Island ranked
31st in the nation for gender parity. Rhode Island’s Gender Parity Score has actually fallen since
1993, when it was 15.9 and Rhode Island ranked 10th in the US.
The Ocean State has never elected a female Governor or a US Senator. Only one woman has ever served
in the US House for Rhode Island: Republican Claudine Schneider, who represented the 2nd
Congressional District from 1981 to 1991. Among Rhode Island’s largest cities, only Woonsocket
currently has a female mayor. After a decade of skulking below the national average, the proportion of
women in the state’s General Assembly has increased, but only to 26.5%.
In 2014, three Rhode Island women won their party's nomination for state executive office, including
Gina Raimondo, the Democratic frontrunner for Governor. The comparative abundance of female
candidates for executive office this Fall provoked commentary that 2014 might be the Year of the Woman
in Rhode Island. Yet, no matter how successful these three women are in November, Rhode Island will
remain a long way from gender parity in elective office.
Part of the underlying reason for the slow progress toward gender parity in Rhode Island, as in the rest of
the US, is our political structure. Representation 2020 is working with other reform organizations to
reform the structures that act as barriers to gender parity in elected office so that we can reach gender
parity within our lifetimes. "Current strategies alone will not get us to gender parity” commented
Representation 2020 director Cynthia Terrell, “we must embrace voting systems that elect more women,
party rules to recruit more women candidates, and legislative practices that make it feasible for women to
serve and lead, if we are to fix the under representation of women in our lifetimes."
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