About Close the Gap California

It’s human nature to look on the bright side, but too much bright can be blinding.

At first glance, we see women have traveled by leaps and bounds to break barriers as leaders across numerous sectors of society. In 2007, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking female elected official in U.S. history when she became Speaker of the House. A woman of color is running as the Vice Presidential nominee for the Democratic Party in 2020- U.S. Senator Kamala Harris! These historic milestones give women hope for a more equal future.

But how far have women really come? It’s scary to think that we may pat ourselves on the back and imagine ourselves on an inevitable path to parity, when the opposite is closer to true.

In California, we are lucky. While we have yet to break 35%, even in our deep blue state, women benefit from a cohort of organizations dedicated to closing the gender gap, with an eye toward rectifying racial imbalance as a core part of that charge. After two cycles of testing and refining Close the Gap California’s recruiting strategy, we were able to reverse the 20-year low in women members as of 2017, alongside our allies statewide. As a result, we have been able to climb to 32.5 percent female representatives in the California statehouse, and more women are running for office than ever before!

We are extremely proud of the progress we have made thus far, but research has shown that sustainable progress actually happens frighteningly slowly, especially when we rely on those in power to enact change. Even after so much time and work that has been dedicated to helping us break the glass ceiling, on average, American women still make up no more than 25 percent of the decision makers or leaders in any single sector.

Industries mirror each other in practice. If women who are leaders in making policy aren’t able to break beyond the 25 percent mark, then, absent public pressure, no organization or industry has any incentive to change how women are represented in positions of power.

Whenever significant shifts have occurred in our culture, they have most often come as a direct result of state and federal legislation. Many women won the right to vote when a majority of states ratified the 19th Amendment. Employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and sex, was banned as a result of federal law. If we are to see more women leaders in our everyday lives, it will be because the people demand it and because our legislators pass bills requiring it.

Let’s take a closer look.

Women represented less than a quarter of boards of directors in the S&P 500 in 2018, with women of color making up less than 5 percent for Fortune 500 companies.

It’s no surprise then that California State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (SD-19) introduced 2018 legislation mandating that all companies headquartered in the state must have at least one woman on their board of directors by January 1, 2020.

The law goes further to increase the mandatory representation for larger boards by requiring boards with five seats to have at least two women directors and those with six or more board seats to have at least three women directors by the end of 2021, or else face a penalty of a $100,000 fine for the first offense.

Surely Hollywood must be nearer to equality, right? With highly public critiques on social media like #OscarsSoWhite and calls to diversify, Hollywood has made significant strides to represent women and people of color on- and behind- the silver screen.

It’s important to note that progress isn’t consistent. Even when we see record-breaking numbers of women participating behind the scenes, taking a magnifying glass to those numbers shows a starker disparity.

According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, women now make up nearly half of union members. Organized labor has seen large strides in women’s leadership. In fact, women hold leadership positions at some of the biggest unions:

For reference, the AFL-CIO is the largest federation of unions in the U.S. and is made up of 56 national and international unions, which represents more than 12.5 million workers. So while women make up at least 50 percent of members, we make up just 20 percent of the AFL-CIO’s executive council.

And that is just nationally. As a cutting-edge state, California surely must be doing better.

If we consider how to build the bench of women leaders to ensure we have a fair chance at representation, the best place to begin is at the local level. Unfortunately, our local government bodies lag behind the State Legislature’s recent progress on that front.

For example, County Boards of Supervisors, often the most effective conduits for women who rise to serve in the State Legislature, currently consist of 296 Supervisors from California’s 58 counties. 27 percent are women.

Even scarier:

A bright spot in the doom and gloom, though, are the seven Boards (or 12 percent) that are majority female: Contra Costa, El Dorado, Los Angeles, Marin, Modoc, San Bernardino and Sonoma.

With more than half of the County Boards in California so lopsided on gender representation, the growing number of women aspiring to higher office are at a huge disadvantage. It is beyond alarming that this critical level of government, which deals with issues facing those most in need (who are disproportionately women and children), women are nowhere near adequately represented. With the Board of Supervisors operating as a pipeline for women candidates into the State Legislature and beyond, this county-level imbalance perpetuates the gender imbalance at the state level, and on up the pipeline to the federal level.

The more women help each other across sectors, the faster we can all rise.

Government is one of the few sectors making strides in women’s representation (and as we’ve shown, our work is far from over), and it has to do more to set the example for other areas of leadership throughout society.

This is why creating pipelines of women is important, and it’s why Close the Gap California and our partner organizations have made a concerted effort to intervene in this imbalance and catapult women beyond the 25 percent barrier by recruiting diverse, accomplished, and credible women to run for state office.

Sure, not every woman we ask to run ends up running, but many do! Imagine if we filled 50 percent of the legislative seats with women. In what other public realms could we see spikes in the percentage of women in leadership? Representation matters.

A generation of women have worked on childcare policies, including universal pre-school and affordable childcare, which would give women equal footing in the workforce. We need more women to help push issues like these — that disproportionately affect women — to the top of the agenda.

Bad fear can paralyze you, but good fear can focus you.

We need this fear to focus you. This Halloween, we hope we scared you just enough. Here are some steps you can take to divert fear into action:

Beyond voting, there are a number of other ways to help enact change for women at the state and local levels.

Senator Jackson recently spoke at our “Forward Into Light” community event and inspired us with these powerful words of encouragement:

Those in power, left to their own devices, will not move progress forward any faster. We need an intervention. Imagine how rapidly we could achieve equality and rectify racial imbalance if we had more women like Senator Jackson and others actively pushing equity legislation.

Close the Gap California (CTGCA) is a statewide campaign launched in 2013 to close the gender gap in the California Legislature by 2028. By recruiting accomplished, progressive women in targeted districts and preparing them to launch competitive campaigns, CTGCA is changing the face of the Legislature one cycle at a time.

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