For Immediate Release
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Contact Information
Representation 2020: Cynthia Terrell, 301-270 4616, ct@fairvote.org
So Close to Parity: Gender Parity in Elected Office in the State of New Hampshire
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:
 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, New Hampshire’s Gender Parity Score was the highest in the nation at 47.5, only
2.5 points shy of parity. This is an impressive improvement from 1993, when New Hampshire ranked 16th
with a Gender Parity Score of 13.3. If the high rate of change over the last 20 years continues into the
future, women will reach parity before the end of 2015!
New Hampshire’s stellar progress toward gender parity has been on many fronts. New Hampshire’s third
female governor currently serves in Concord. New Hampshire is the first state to ever send an all-female
delegation to Congress. One in three New Hampshire state legislators are female — the 5th highest in the
nation. In 2009-2010, a majority of state senators were female, a first for any state legislative chamber in
the US.
In part, New Hampshire’s progress toward parity is due to the use of multi-member districts in its House
of Representatives. In 2013, those state legislative chambers that use multi-member districts were 31.0%
female, while those that did not were made up of only 22.8% women. Combined with small
constituencies, multi-member districts in New Hampshire provide a more level playing field on which
female candidates can campaign, enter politics and move onto higher political office.
In line with the close relationship between women’s representation and institutions, Representation 2020
is working with other reform organizations to develop remedies for the structural barriers to gender parity
in elected office. "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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