• The percentage of House Members employing a woman Chief of Staff has stagnated over the last two years: Only 35 percent of Representatives have a female Chief of Staff.
• In the past four years, the percentage of male House Members with a female Chief of Staff has remained below one-third.
• The number of female Representatives with a woman Chief of Staff has increased throughout the last four years, but still lingers below 50 percent.
• Only one-quarter of Senators currently employ a female Chief of Staff.
• The percentage of male Senators employing a female Chief of Staff has actually decreased over the past four years, and is now estimated to be only 20 percent.

Out of over 530 Chiefs of Staff in Congressional offices on the Hill, less than 180 are women.

The Women’s Campaign Forum will host an evening to shed light on the lack of women in leadership positions on September 23, 2010 titled Ladder to the Top: Shattering the Glass Ceiling.

The event will be held in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.  For more information or reservations, contact Erin L. Cutraro, WCF Vice President & Political Director, 314-827-6149.

The Women’s Campaign Forum is dedicated to advancing the political participation and leadership of women who support reproductive health choices for all.

For nine years, Wal-Mart has fought to stave off a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company has long discriminated against its female workers in pay and promotions. So far it has avoided a trial on the merits of the issue. The battleground instead is whether the million or so women who have worked for Wal-Mart since 2001 really constitute a class, which the company vigorously disputes. In 2004, a federal district court judge said they did, and in April the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling the case could proceed.

Now Wal-Mart has taken the class issue to the Supreme Court. It is probably a smart legal move, given the court’s clear tendency to rule in favor of corporations, particularly when big classes or discrimination claims are involved. We hope the court resists the temptation to toss out the case, which would force women to file lawsuits one by one. Wal-Mart’s employment practices deserve a full hearing.

The case originally began with seven female employees of Wal-Mart who realized that men were being paid more than women for comparable jobs and were getting promoted more often. As District Judge Martin J. Jenkins wrote in 2004, the statistics showed that women working in Wal-Mart stores were paid less than men in every region and in most job categories. The salary gap widened over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time, he wrote, and women took longer to enter into management positions.

Just because statistics showed a general salary gap, and more than 100 women presented evidence of second-class status, does that mean that each of the more than one million women who have worked at Wal-Mart in the last decade were victims of discrimination?

The company said that was an outlandish claim, and argued that there was no pattern or intent of discrimination. Judge Jenkins found that the potential discrimination was big enough to affect women as a class. The Ninth Circuit agreed and said it was better to deal with the matter in one lawsuit than with thousands clogging up the court system.

If this goes forward it would be the largest employment discrimination lawsuit in American history. Wal-Mart could face more than $1 billion in damages if the case proceeds and the company loses. Wal-Mart is the world’s largest private employer, and as the Ninth Circuit wrote, “mere size does not render a case unmanageable.” The Supreme Court should give the women of Wal-Mart a chance to make their case together.

With this fall’s midterm elections, the number of women serving in Congress could drop for the first time in a generation — a twist on a political season many had dubbed “the year of the woman.”

If large numbers of Democratic incumbents lose in November, as expected, many women could be replaced by men. Female candidates tend to do better in Democratic years, and 2010 is shaping up as a successful year for Republicans.

Women now hold 90 seats in Congress: 69 are Democrats and 21 are Republicans. After the November election, Congress could end up with as many as 10 fewer female members, prognosticators now say, the first backslide in the uninterrupted march of women to Washington since 1978.

The prospect of a setback has advocates of women’s rights in disbelief, but determined to try to prevent it. “That is not going to happen,” said Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, which is working to elect candidates of both sexes who support women’s equality.

While political attention has focused this year on Sarah Palin’s handpicked candidates and on a record number of Republican women running for House seats, primary losses have thinned their ranks to several dozen.

In fact, just four women are among the GOP’s 46 “Young Guns,” as the party calls its frontline challengers who are considered future leaders.

Republican campaign officials expect more female candidates will join the group as they prove themselves with the fundraising and organization needed to mount serious campaigns. But the bulk of “Republican candidates in these really promising seats are men,” said David Wasserman, a congressional analyst at the Cook Political Report who has been monitoring the situation.

Many of the vulnerable Democratic women this fall first arrived on the waves of the 2006 and 2008 elections, but now face tough odds in districts that have since soured on the party in power and on President Obama’s agenda.

Freshman Rep. Debbie Halvorson (D-Ill.), who won in 2008 in an increasingly split district long dominated by the GOP, is being challenged by a 32-year-old Iraq war veteran, Adam Kinzinger, one of the Young Guns.

Another endangered Democratic congresswoman, Betsy Markey, a freshman from Colorado, is being challenged by a fifth-generation farmer and state representative, Cory Gardner, who is also a Young Gun.

Republican officials in Washington say that their female candidates will make gains, pointing to Montgomery City Councilwoman Martha Roby, who is running against Democratic Rep. Bobby Bright in Alabama, and ophthalmologist Nan Hayworth, who hopes to oust two-term Democratic Rep. John Hall in New York.

“The 2010 candidate recruitment class is a formidable one, and that includes a number of top-tier female candidates who will likely be called ‘congresswoman’ after November,” said Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee.

In the Senate, if voters reject Democrats Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Patty Murray of Washington, both will probably be replaced by men.

Republican female candidates could pick up Senate seats in Connecticut, where World Wrestling Entertainment’s Linda McMahon is running for the open seat held by retiring Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, and in Nevada, where “tea party” favorite Sharron Angle wants to oust Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Yet overall, the numbers are not likely to overcome potential losses by women.

The fortunes of women in Congress have ebbed and flowed since the first, Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, took office in the House in 1917, three years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote.

Women made mostly steady gains through the election of President Kennedy in 1960, when 20 women held office in Congress, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Click here to read the full story.

TWO years ago today, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee, introduced the world to his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. Chosen by Mr. McCain’s campaign strategists as a cynical rejoinder to the ill-starred presidential bid of Hillary Clinton, Governor Palin was a historic pick: the second woman to run for vice president on a major party ticket and the first Republican woman in history to do so.

In the 24 months since her appearance onstage in Dayton, Ohio, Ms. Palin has enthralled pundits and journalists who devote countless television hours and column inches to her every Twitter message and Facebook update, while provoking outrage and exasperation from the left. Case in point: Ms. Palin, now a Fox news contributor, and her cable colleague Glenn Beck planned a rally for Saturday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 47 years to the day after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, a wily usurpation of an anniversary cherished by progressives and civil rights activists.

The left should be outraged and exasperated by all this — but at their own failings as much as Ms. Palin’s ascension. Since the 2008 election, progressive leaders have done little to address the obvious national appetite for female leadership. And despite (or because of) their continuing obsession with Ms. Palin, they have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of American women in politics.

What makes this all the more frustrating, of course, is that progressives helped to give Ms. Palin her start; her political career was a natural outgrowth of feminist successes. As a teen, she played basketball thanks to Title IX; as an adult, she enjoyed a professional life made possible by the involvement of her load-bearing husband Todd, entering Alaska’s governor’s mansion at 42 with four children in tow and giving birth to a fifth while there.

Ms. Palin, in turn, has been making a greedy grab at claiming feminism as her own. She recently marked the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment by expressing her gratitude “to those brave feminist foremothers who struggled and sacrificed, endured imprisonment and ridicule … to grant future generations of American women a voice.” On the same day, she sent out this Twitter message: “Who hijacked the term ‘feminist’? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/ whom they disagree on a singular issue.”

The hijacking accusation goes both ways. Ms. Palin’s infuriating ability to put a new twist on feminism — after decades of the word’s being besmirched by the right and the left — allows her to both distance herself from and accentuate the movement’s maligned reputation. Her new spin, of course, is that she does not support policies that move women forward.

You’d be forgiven for thinking she does. Ms. Palin has spent much of 2010 burnishing her political bona fides and extending her influence by way of the Mama Grizzlies, a gang of Sarah- approved, maverick-y female politicians looking to “take back” America with “common-sense” solutions.

Sure, the Grizzlies sound somewhat progressive on paper. But from their opposition to reproductive rights to their work against health care reform and labor policies that would empower American women, their ideas are just antiquated clichés dressed up in designer suits. Like Ms. Palin herself, their talk about being “mama bears” and “tough as an ox … wearing lipstick” simply reduces female candidates’ political prospects to maternal worth and sex appeal.

It’s easy of course, for liberals to laugh off Ms. Palin’s “you go, girl!” ethos and increasingly aggressive co-optation of feminist symbols. We progressives discount her references to the women’s movement — not to mention her validity as a candidate — by looking down on her as a dim, opportunistic, mean-girl prom queen, all spunk and no policy muscle.

Click here to read the full editorial.

Anna Holmes is the founding editor of the blog Jezebel. Rebecca Traister is the author of the forthcoming “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women.”

NEW YORK - Congressman Charles Rangel released the following statement in celebration of Women’s Equality Day, on August 26, 2010, the 90th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.

Thursday, August 26, marks the 90^th anniversary of the final ratification of the 19^th amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote.  This day is recognized each year since 1971. Back then, just twelve women served in the House; and only one in the Senate. Today, in 2010, there are 76 women in the House and 17 in the Senate.

Those gains were facilitated by the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed African Americans the right to vote.  In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first African American congresswoman when she was elected to represent a district in Brooklyn, and went on to become the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Today, there are 13 black women serving in the House, and six Latinas. Congresswomen Yvette Clarke and Nydia Velasquez are among the inspiring new generation of leaders representing New York in the U.S. Congress.  That same quality of leadership also distinguishes many women serving in state and local elected offices.

In the U.S. Congress, one needs look no further than the office of the Speaker of the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi is compiling an outstanding record of achievement.

Working with President Obama, she shepherded through Congress the landmark health care reform law–an achievement of historic proportions.  It ended the discriminatory practice of charging women higher insurance rates–due to their gender; and for the first time includes maternity care as an essential service.

My Democratic colleagues and I continue to fight for fairness and equality for America’s working women, which is even more critical now as many families find themselves relying solely on the mother’s paycheck.  Mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American families.

The Lilly Ledbetter law, the first bill President Obama signed when he took office, provides women with the tools to fight pay discrimination in the workplace.  Still, too many women are working as hard or more than their male counterparts, but still earning less. That’s why the House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act and why the Senate needs to pass it as well.

As we mark the 90^th anniversary of a woman’s right to vote – and Equality Day – we celebrate the role that our sisters have played not only at the polls, but in every part of civic life. For our nation to reach its full potential, we need more women as public officials and even more of them engaged in creating and carrying out public policy. Their full participation can only  bring  greater progress not just for women and families, but for all members of our society.

Op-Ed for the New York Times, by Christine Stansell

LOOKING back on the adoption of the 19th Amendment 90 years ago Thursday — the largest act of enfranchisement in our history — it can be hard to see what the fuss was about. We’re inclined to assume that the passage of women’s suffrage (even the term is old-fashioned) was inevitable, a change whose time had come. After all, voting is now business as usual for women. And although women are still poorly represented in Congress, there are influential female senators and representatives, and prominent women occupy governors’ and mayors’ offices and legislative seats in every part of the United States.

Yet entrenched opposition nationwide sidelined the suffrage movement for decades in the 19th century. By 1920, antagonism remained in the South, and was strong enough to come close to blocking ratification.

Proposals for giving women the vote had been around since the first convention for women’s rights in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848. At the end of the Civil War, eager abolitionists urged Congress to enfranchise both the former slaves and women, black and white. The 14th Amendment opened the possibility, with its generous language about citizenship, equal protection and due process.

But, at that time, women’s suffrage was still unthinkable to anyone but radical abolitionists. Since the nation’s founding, Americans considered women to be, by nature, creatures of the home, under the care and authority of men. They had no need for the vote; their husbands represented them to the state and voted for them. So, in the 14th Amendment’s second section, Republicans inserted the word “male,” prohibiting the denial of voting rights to “any of the male inhabitants” of the states.

In the ensuing decades, the nation backpedaled from the equal-rights guarantees of the 14th and 15th amendments. Black voters in the South were refused federal protection, and even in the North and West, literacy tests and educational requirements were used to turn immigrants and laborers away from the polls. The suffrage movement itself embraced anti-immigrant and anti-black views. In 1903 in New Orleans, at their annual convention, suffragists listened to speakers inveigh against the Negro menace. Black suffragists met far across town. (An elderly Susan B. Anthony paid them a respectful call.) It was the nadir of the women’s movement.

Later in the first decade of the new century, though, an influx of bold young women, allergic to the old pieties about female purity and comfortable working with men, displaced their moralistic, teetotaling elders. Black women, working women and immigrants joined white reformers in a stunningly successful coalition. From 1909 to 1912, they won suffrage in Oregon, California and Washington. More states followed, so that by the 1916 presidential election, 4 million new votes were in play.

“Antis” still managed to defeat suffrage measures in four Northern states that year. “Woman suffrage wants the wife to be as much the ruler as the husband, if not the chief ruler,” warned one antagonist. But such views were waning — everywhere but the South.

President Woodrow Wilson, who had been a genteel but firm anti-suffragist, was indebted to female voters for helping him win a close election, and in 1918 he endorsed a constitutional amendment. That year the 19th Amendment passed the House. It stalled in the Senate — blocked by conservative Southerners — but Wilson muscled it through in 1919.

Thirty-six of the 48 states then needed to ratify it. Western states did so promptly, and in the North only Vermont and Connecticut delayed. But the segregated South saw in the 19th Amendment a grave threat: the removal of the most comprehensive principle for depriving an entire class of Americans of full citizenship rights. The logic of women’s disenfranchisement helped legitimize relegating blacks to second-class citizenship.

Female voters would also pose practical difficulties, described bluntly by a Mississippi man: “We are not afraid to maul a black man over the head if he dares to vote, but we can’t treat women, even black women, that way. No, we’ll allow no woman suffrage.”

Nine Southern states joined by Delaware forced ratification to a halt, one state short. Only Tennessee was left, and the opposition had good reason to think it would line up with the rest of the region. But after a nine-day special session in the heat of August 1920, a legislator pledged to the nays jumped ship — he later said it was because his mother told him to — and the 36th state was in.

To read the full op-ed, click the link. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/opinion/25stansell.html?ref=opiniondment

Christine Stansell, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, is the author of “The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present.”

Murkowski gained just 38 votes on Tuesday, coming up well shy of what she needed to win her party’s nomination.

With new votes tallied across the state, Murkowski cut her deficit early on, but by the end of the day she still trailed Miller by 1,630 votes with approximately 15,000 more ballots counted. Another 10,000 or so are to be counted later.

By conceding, Murkowski becomes the third incumbent senator to lose re-nomination this year and the second to lose a primary. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) lost a primary in April, while Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) fell at his party’s May convention.

In addition, four House incumbents have lost their primaries.

Marjorie Margolis

The New York Times Magazine ran an interview with former Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies who happens to be Chelsea Clinton’s new mother-in-law.  While declining to talk about the happy couple or wedding details, she was more than willing to talk about her passion, The Women’s Campaign International.

Working in emerging democracies and post-conflict regions around the world, Women’s Campaign International advances opportunities for women to actively participate in public advocacy and political processes.  In providing the requisite skills, knowledge and culturally-sensitive support, we develop leaders who transform the lives of everyone they serve.

Women’s Campaign International was founded in 1998 by Pennsylvania Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies. After serving in Congress, Ms. Margolies led the United States delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. At the conference, 189 countries signed a Platform for Action that pledged to further the rights of women around the world. Inspired by these commitments and the astounding attendance of thousands of women participants from around the world, Ms. Margolies founded WCI to help women achieve the goals laid out in the Platform for Action.

WCI’s programs help women find their voices by giving them tangible skills in areas such as leadership, public speaking, media relations, grassroots organizing, campaign strategies, voter outreach and mobilization, polling, policy analysis and fundraising. WCI has worked with political leaders, activists, advocacy groups and non-profit partner organizations to ensure that women have a legitimate opportunity to participate in the development of public policy, and that women’s issues are placed on local, national and regional agendas. With the help of local civil society organizations (CSOs), WCI is able to tailor its programs to fit the needs, culture and abilities of women in each country.

For more information, visit http://www.womenscampaigninternational.org.

Alice Germond of the Democratic National Committee tells the story of how it happened in an op-ed in Politico. Read it here.

Ping, a nearly 30 year resident of District 29 (which includes Colerain, Crosby, Harrison, and Springfield Townships, Greenhills, Mt. Healthy, and North College Hill), expressed her strong desire to energetically step up to the challenge of serving her home district on a more personal level with dedication and a committed presence in the community. “When I’m elected I will make myself accessible and highly visible in the communities in which I live and serve.”

Ping is no stranger to hard work. “I took lemons and made lemonade! Being a young single working mother was a tough road. Yet, I found employment at Miami University – a choice which not only provided job security and health benefits but gave my daughters access to one of the highest quality college educations available in Ohio. Today, I am the proud mother of two Ohio Public School teachers. I will bring my strong work ethic, resourcefulness and frugality to Columbus to help Ohio be a source of jobs, education and fiscal soundness.”

After retiring from 30 years of employment at Miami University, Ping devoted herself to the needs of her family while starting and growing a small business with her husband Sandy. Together, Liz and Sandy have three children and four grandchildren. Ping’s youngest daughter and son-in-law are veterans of the First Gulf War. “As a mother of a military woman, I understand the great sacrifices the everyday citizen must sometimes make to keep our country safe. I understand what sacrifice means – what it means to work — and work hard.”

Ping also has a personal trade union connection. “As teachers, both of my daughters are active members of the Ohio Education Association,” stated Ping. “One daughter is the Union Representative for her school.” Ping understands the important role our trade unions have played and continue to play in the history and the future of the United States – “Our Unions have helped shape our identity as a nation – they built the middle class.“

To learn more or to support Liz Ping, visit http://www.lizping.com/.