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They already have a fire in their belly to, to accomplish something, to make change.

They don't yet see the connection to elected roles and what they could do in changing, you know, changing the world for the better.

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Despite progress, women remain underrepresented in US politics and often encounter substantial challenges as candidates.

One organization that seeks to change that is, She Should Run.

Today we're joined by Erin Loos Cutraro, the CEO and founder of the nonpartisan organization.

She Should Run has one clear mission to encourage and support women from diverse backgrounds to consider careers in public office.

Thank you for joining us, Erin.

How are you?

I'm doing great.

Bonnie.

And how is She Should Run doing?

Tell us first.

how long ago did you found it?

And what kind of progress can you claim?

Because the last couple three decades have been times of great change for women in politics.

No doubt.

No doubt.

So She Should Run actually, she has been doing this work for over a decade.

We got our start, we were actually a project within another organization that was a 501C-4 and a PAC.

and what I found is that there was no single entity focused on finding the women who aren't already thinking about running for office.

And so in many ways, we know when women run, this is still true today, by the way, when women run, they win at the same rate as men.

but there aren't enough women actually running, ultimately.

And then on the ballot, and so and so that is the work of She Should Run is finding and targeting women who are already thinking about it and meeting them with, really, really accessible first step resources.

And how do you think?

Tell me about how you've closed the gap between men's and women's women's representation in everything from local and national politics since you started the organization?

Of course, there are several organizations working on this issue.

That's right.

But, if you can zero down to some places, anywhere way where you have the greatest impact, that would be interesting to know.

Yeah, of course.

And I think it is important always to, to kind of, make folks know that there is a robust ecosystem that exists to support women running, much of the work that the vast majority of work that people know is the work of supporting women who have already made the decision to run.

So this is where you see political action committees giving money.

you know, a lot of the kind of traditional candidate training programs, how to run a media plan, how to, you know, do a get out the vote effort, all of those, incredibly important efforts and generally partisan efforts, because they're generally tied to political party happen once a woman has already made the decision to run.

The work of she should run is actually really nontraditional.

And that, you know, we are through partnerships, through national awareness campaigns, we make the case for women's representation at all levels, primarily at the local level, because we know that's often where women are taking their very first steps.

Doesn't mean we would discourage women from running for for running for federal office.

But this reality that the majority of women who are, you know, just coming to that starting line for the first time are often doing it in local office.

And the vast majority of us have opportunities in elected office are at the local level You tend to work more on local races and national or statewide races.

Yeah, and I can give you an example, because that might be really helpful to kind of hear the type of women that we're often engaging with.

So, because we are working, it's a, it's a, a fun problem to have to solve, which is how do you find women who aren't looking for you which is the mission of She Should Run You're right.

And we're trying to find those women who are outside the echo chamber who are making change in their community, the issues that are impacting them, who are not thinking about their potential in elected office.

And so the tools to do that, and this is really led by research, are, you know, women are, most often motivated by people in their personal networks.

So it's like that peer to peer encouragement or by political gatekeepers, the influence they have, over women's ultimate decision and even influence to think about running for office is, is large.

So, you know, in the case of sShe Should Run, we, are often connecting the dots between issues that women are talking about.

and what that looks like.

If this is an issue in the community here, an issue at the state level, what that actually looks like in elected office.

So what are the policies that you could make a difference in.

So it is it is sort of lighting that spark.

So I'll give you an example which is you know we had a we had an incredible young woman who actually serves on She Should Run's community coucil advising us on her, our program development.

she came to us because she had a traumatic experience, which many young classroom teachers aide, was in a classroom when a child, shot a gun.

thankfully, no one was hurt.

But for all of the obvious reasons, this was very traumatic for her, for everyone in the classroom.

She, you know, prior to this with somebody who was incredibly involved, volunteering in her community, but she just felt sort of loss, not sure where to go.

She had a friend who knew that she was hosting.

We hosted a series of, webinars on issues that women are talking about, like gun violence prevention, and then brought to the table, look at elected a local elected officials to talk about the roles that they're playing to, you know, make change for better in their communities.

So it happened to be in this case that a friend of this young woman, this young woman whose name is Eileen and encourage her to attend.

And, you know, it was the thing that unstuck Eileen in this from this like very, you know, understandable sort of paralysis that she was in, she came she heard local officials talk about what they could accomplish.

She then went on, you know, not everybody has this immediate, immediate of a response, but she created a task committee in her, in her community, to address that issue of gun violence prevention as well as other issues.

And I think that's that's often what it is.

It's what we see with women is that are especially that where we're coming to.

They're already doing things.

They already have that fire in their belly to, to accomplish something, to make change.

But they don't yet see the connection to elected roles and what they can do in changing, you know, changing the world for the better through policy making.

And so that's the spark that She Should Run, provides and really makes the connection.

And what did she run for and did she win?

So she has she's still preparing.

So this is another myth about, the what it takes to make a candidate.

So we find in our.

So we've been doing this work for a while, so we've been able to see it.

it takes somewhere between 4 and 7 years, often from the point where a woman is actually thinking about running to the point where she's on the ballot.

Now, it's not always true.

There are there are some women who will wake up and just know they're going to do it, and they put themselves in ballot immediately.

They're recruited.

There's a there's a there is a, you know, opportunity right in front of them.

But that's rare.

That's not how it normally happens.

How it happens is someone gets a little bit more involved in their community.

They, you know, they're seen as a change maker.

They're then encouraged to run.

They then are looking for which office they're going to run for.

These things take time.

So in Eileen's case, she started this, this task force she's already been tapped for, she's in Southern California.

She's already been tapped for a couple of other leadership opportunities and are preparing and is preparing for a run that has not happened yet.

Tell me about the inequality.

Certainly in Congress, we know it's nowhere near 50/50.

But where is it?

All levels of office were sitting at or below, 30%, of elected roles.

And this is even less so in terms of representation of women from marginalized communities.

So we know it's even more challenging, you know, for women of color across the board to, to get in, especially to the highest levels of office.

And, and, you know, I always pause because it sounds daunting, you know, this reality that women are 51% of the population.

We're still representing this small sliver of elective roles.

So we've come a long way.

We've come a long way.

And, you know, women, taking these seats of power, changing the way the policy is being made.

it's just, that change is not happening as fast as some of us would like to see.

This show has been on the air for 33 years, and I covered women's issues before that.

and everybody thought that within a few years after the, you know, second wave feminism came through and even third wave feminism, that there would be more women involved in politics, and it just didn't work that way.

Women, I don't know if women have more of an aversion to fundraising than men, because that's the most in part, the most important part, I think, of running for office is asking people to support you personally.

It's not just your your nonprofit organization, it's me personally, or maybe you and your party, but, men seem to have no problem.

You know, they knock on 100 doors and 99, get slammed in their face, and they don't care.

Yeah, they go on to the hundredth and find the, you know, the big injection of money.

Whereas women get depressed after the first ten.

That's right.

I mean, it it is a different experience.

The good news is women are raising just as much money as men.

They're just often having to work a lot harder for it because that, you know, traditional boys club network is, you know, being built for women, in a system that was built for men.

So, you know, it, it's sometimes a harder uphill climb.

Women get there, they get it done.

But it is most definitely a barrier.

And I will say, you know, over the course of time, so barriers have shifted too.

So where, you know, money may have been the number one barrier before.

One of the barriers that we see rising to the top now is just the toxicity of and and frankly, like real threats that exist for women when they put themselves out there to run for leadership roles.

And you know, piece of our work in elected leadership roles, this reality that the system itself is sort of it's it's rigged against women, you know, you've got incumbency, you know, it's a little in the weeds, but this reality that, you know, I think the state is like 90%, elected roles in this country are, occupied by incumbents, and it is around that same percent of individuals who win.

So in, in a race against an incumbent, not, you know, nine out of ten times the incumbents are going to win.

So it's it's really difficult to, you know, to break that mold.

And not everyone, you know, not every woman deserving woman is able to do so.

But it is in some ways a little bit of a numbers game.

In addition to, you know, we have to tackle the system that's keeping women out at the same time.

But how has the internet, if at all, changed fundraising for women candidates as that level of the field at all?

The playing field has leveled more for women.

But what we see the issue with is less about individual donors and that access, because women can connect really well, you know, the small dollar fundraising, I know I was just looking at a report about, you know, the success that women have across the board.

But women, and especially women from marginalized communities really follow behind when it comes to institutional support.

So the big, big PAC dollars are still and and again, this is you know, this is the system is they're going to the incumbents and the incumbents are largely white males.

And so breaking that system, you know, requires sort of a dismantling of, of a little bit of everything.

So I would say we're moving in a positive direction.

The more that we can get individuals involved.

Small dollar donations, which go really a long way when you can build the mass, that is, you know, small efforts.

So women are, generally speaking, more likely to be gun averse, although the gun lobby has done, unfortunately, a pretty good job of luring more women into hunting and those sorts of things.

But, so what other issues?

Obviously.

Choice.

Yeah, I would think I'm in trouble.

But you tell me, from where you sit.

We did a really interesting, research study looking at the motivators that help women connect the dots to, running for office.

So it was basically, we know all that.

We know the reasons that women who've already made the decision why they're running, but it's a whole different, landscape when you're talking to women who are not thinking about running and what would actually motivate them.

And so it's two areas.

One area is they're already involved in community service.

They see it as a logical next step.

Another area is issues.

So you know these this women aren't monolithic.

Of course there's no one issue that motivates all women.

but what we did is we partnered with, YWCA and UN women on research they had done, to really, you know, get into what are the issues that matter most.

And so, you know, that was everything from, of course, reproductive health to the economy.

I mean, pretty much to all of the issues you can think of.

So climate, racism, and, and, and gun violence and just violence prevention, period.

Gun violence is obviously something that, you know, is, is, a major piece of what we're talking about when it comes to violence against women and just violence overall.

But, you know, for us, it, it, there's no one issue that's going to kind of sort of pop for every woman.

But there is we it is interesting to see the overlap with what polling is saying now around this election cycle.

Obviously, the economy rising to the top there, reproductive health rising to the top.

I think, you know, especially to Supreme Court and, you know, the the current deliberation there, is going to remain top of mind, I think, for women.

So, I think we will continue to see women stepping forward.

I do want to you know, you mentioned the sort of energy in the past.

And how it feels like that's that's sort of waned.

And what's interesting to me is, we have had a couple of moments in time over history where you feel like, okay, this is it.

This is the moment when we're finally going to tip the scale and the floodgates are going to open and there's no looking back.

And most recently, I would say that was coming out of the 2016 election.

You know, we definitely saw it in the surge of women candidates stepping up, primarily Democratic women, but also Republican women in that case, and it was most definitely a surge period in the, you know, election cycle immediately following that election.

And even the one that followed that and I, I say now it's I'm taking a, a cue from our great friends at center for American Women in Politics.

who track these numbers very closely, and one of their scholars described it as if you picture, like all the all the apple trees being shaken after that election cycle, it was essentially everyone who had been thinking about or who were primed to run for office stepped up and did so, or took action right after, in that moment, and in many ways, it was well.

And I think a lot I just interrupt you for a second because I remember being at the, Democratic convention in 1992, the, the year of the woman.

The Year of the Woman goes back, a lot stronger than that.

And of course, there were efforts ever since, you know, the 19th amendment and women, - That's right got the right right to vote on a national scale.

that, people have thought, oh, we're finally going to do it.

We're finally going to be equal.

You know, the reality is this work is hard and it doesn't happen overnight.

And even with these really, you know, promising moments where you see so many women step up and we have these, you know, these bumps in representation, we're still not there.

And and we can't we can't stop doing the work.

You know, the work feels harder sometimes.

I would say we're in one of those periods right now.

It's feels harder.

and the reality is, if you just look back in time at how much has gone into getting us to where we are today, we have no choice but to continue pushing forward.

What about the advent of Uber conservative women, not just conservative women, but Uber conservative women, getting into politics and getting a lot of power, especially in these Trump years.

I think of Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia.

I think of Kristi Noem from South Dakota, who bragged about shooting and killing her puppy.

What is that done to, to women's participation in politics?

I'll tell you what it has.

it has definitely been a challenge for any sort of sweeping message around the need for more women in office, because we see it as a nonpartisan organization who, by the way, cares deeply about seeing women on both sides of the aisle, that when you have, examples of, women who are in, you know, tremendous positions of power who are actively rejecting a message around advancing women or who are actively saying they do not want to work with any sort of gender equity initiatives.

you know, our response to that has to be, as with all things, you have to you have to, which is challenging, even if it is challenging and say what I think is necessary.

What is challenging is they have, I feel like an outsized voice.

they represent a very small percentage of the population, but a very present voice.

And so, it is okay to say that women are not monolithic and that there is going to be a small percentage of women.

In any case, when you're trying to level the playing field who rise to positions of power, they are not the overwhelming voice, they are not the overwhelming majority.

And in fact, we do find that the majority of women on both sides of the aisle that step up are willing, in their own ways.

And this may look differently in a conservative district.

But to make a case for women and we need women on both sides of the aisle doing that, and we need to, at the same time acknowledge that there are going to be some who are actively working against us, and that cannot stop us.

It can't slow us.

It has to energize us to continue moving forward.

We acknowledge it and we move forward.

What about, you know, you're talking about integrating, extreme right wing women into the message that you're trying to send out.

What about, diverse women?

-Yes How are they doing compared to white women and compared to men?

The barriers for women of color across the board are much greater.

So that's in everything from, being less likely to be encouraged to run, you know, not seeing themselves represented, therefore questioning their own qualifications.

Should they be one of the magical few who make it through less likely to get the institutional support?

and yet we still see incredible examples of women making it for bringing their own personal experiences often, you know, often challenged for being just, you know, just a nurse or just a teacher or just a mother who is mourning the death of her son serving in office.

And it's in those just moments that I get really great energy, by the way, because it's that voice that you need in elected office, people with real, you know, closest to the communities that they serve.

but we have to do everything in our power to, to, ensure they can get there, just acknowledge the road is harder.

and, and, you know, and build the pathways for it to be easier.

We have to build for a better future.

I mean, truly, this is we're not going backwards in, in the increased diversity in this country.

You know, She Should Run, because we do this very early pipeline building.

We actually track our data, toward the census data that we see coming for 2060. because we know if we're building, you know, it takes women so many years to sort of get in position to, to run that we have to be looking around the corner and not around the corner is a beautifully diverse country that we want to see fully represented in elected office.

And where would you say they are making the most progress?

Are they still?

I covered Congress in the late 80s, early 90s and women were making a ton, particularly women of color Yeah.

Were making tremendous progress.

Is that still the case?

And in that time, obviously, we had a female speaker for two different sets of years, but she Pelosi was speaker for a long time, and she was very big on raising money for women and women of color to join her in the House and in the Senate.

Did it work?

Yes, it worked.

And yes, the, you know, the problem isn't solved.

So both are true.

you know, we we if you look at the trend lines, which is what you have to pay attention to, we are ticking in the right direction.

that said, you know, we're still in a position where, you know, depending on which, which sort of data source you're looking at, we're well over 100 years away from seeing parity in elected office.

you know, our our if I look at sort of the landscape of where a lot of the work is happening right now, I mean, I know there's a lot more and essential work happening at the state legislative level.

as we're seeing, you know, a lot of a lot of legislation that, that, frankly, is very harmful to women, being moved forward with the, you know, directly tied to the lack of representation of women.

So I think it's I have great optimism in the work that I'm seeing happen down ticket.

and I think that's true, of course, for all levels of office, we want to say there's over 500,000 offices in this country and 99% of them at the local level.

Most people don't realize that a lot of these things are, you know, legislative things that are happening in your very like your backyard.

and we need women in all of those spaces and places.

and I think I'm hopeful to see a lot of efforts focused on state legislature, on mayors.

you know, we're pulling that down ticket because I think it will have a direct effect on what we actually see at the federal level as well.

And, let's look forward to a rosy future with, more women and women of color in office in both parties.

And thank you for joining us.

Erin Loos Cutraro, CEO and founder of She Should Run.

That's it for this edition.

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