ShareThisThe political landscape was supposed to be significantly reshaped after 1992, known as the "Year of the Woman," when voters sent an unprecedented number of women to Congress.
It wasn't. After several years of incremental increases in the number of women serving in office, their numbers leveled off a decade ago and dropped in 2010 for the first time in 30 years.
But political activists see signs that 2012 will be different -- and a growing effort to get more women into politics will get a boost Thursday with the rollout of Political Parity, a bipartisan group of 50 female leaders working to double the number of women elected to Congress and high-ranking office by 2022.
The group has been working behind the scenes for two years, but what makes its public debut remarkable is that it will be a rare bipartisan moment in Washington.
Launching more women into public office has united Political Parity members Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Janice Crouse, a senior fellow with Concerned Women for America, which has asked Congress to stop funding Planned Parenthood.
"The trick is that we're not supporting any specific candidates, we just want to see more women in office," said Kerry Healey, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and a foreign policy adviser to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. "We want to know what we can do collectively to remove the impediments to women running for office."
Political Parity is one of several new bipartisan organizations that are organizing to capitalize on a rare convergence in the political world. This year will be the first time since 1992 that a presidential election and new statewide redistricting maps go into effect in the same year. That is good news for potential female candidates, their backers say.
The presidential election will bring out more voters who are untethered by their political partisanship. And the redrawing of state political maps will mean more seats will be open.
In addition, with public opinion polls showing an all-time level of voter disgust at the job performance of Congress, women could gain traction by running as outsiders. Only 17 percent of Congress is female, and women hold only six governorships.
"There is much more opportunity for newcomers" in 2012, said Mary Hughes of Palo Alto, Calif., founder of the 2012 Project, another such effort. "It's much easier to win an open seat than to challenge and beat an incumbent."
Though Hughes is a longtime Democratic political consultant, the 2012 Project is nonpartisan and is aligned with Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics.
Backed by 70 allied groups ranging from Emily's List, which works to elect pro-choice Democrats, to the Republican Majority for Choice, the 2012 Project aims to connect potential female candidates with the wide array of existing fundraising and organizing resources to help them launch a candidacy.
One reason that more women don't run: Nobody asks them. Hughes and others point to studies that show women need to be asked several times by someone they trust before they will commit to running.
But "men wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, 'I see a senator,' " said Siobhan "Sam" Bennett, CEO and president of the nonpartisan Women's Campaign Forum. "A woman's knee-jerk response is, 'I'm not qualified.'
"The problem isn't that women don't win," Bennett said. "It's that women don't run."
A 2008 Rutgers University study found that 53 percent of female state representatives nationally "had not seriously thought about running until someone else suggested it." Only 28 percent of men felt the same.
For more than a year, the 2012 Project has dispatched its faculty of 70-plus former female elected officeholders to talk to women in places where they wouldn't usually be recruited: medical societies, nurses' organizations, Realtors meetings, business groups. They're focusing on women over 45 years old.
"People are saying, 'Let's try something different.' We can't keep talking to the same people and asking them to run," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Rutgers center.
(Reach Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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