WeToo III: Looking for a few good women

This is the third in our series looking at efforts for women to achieve gender parity in the California Legislature. Today we offer a closer look at how reaching that goal starts with recruiting good candidates.

Women have never achieved parity with their male colleagues in the California Legislature. Many advocates believe that could change before the end of the decade, but getting there is hardly a given.

Susannah Delano, Executive Director at Close the Gap California, a group that recruits progressive women to run for office, says her organization identified 96 possible open seats for the four election cycles from 2022-2028. But that number is fluid. Close the Gap anticipated only eight open seats for the 2022 election. There were eventually almost 40.

No matter the eventual number, Delano says it is only a small part of what it will take to reach parity.

“If all it took was open seats, we would’ve seen California get a lot closer to parity after 2016 when there were a ton of them,” she says. “Women were not even 40 percent of legislative candidates in California, even in 2022*. So if more than 50 percent of the candidate field is not women, it doesn’t matter how well trained or well-funded they are, we’re not going to catch up for a couple hundred years.”

To that end, she says groups like hers, Emerge and those on the other side of the political fence have made recruitment, support and training of good women candidates their top priority. And a big part of that, regardless of party or political beliefs, is getting women first to see themselves as a viable candidate.

“If all it took was open seats, we would’ve seen California get a lot closer to parity after 2016 when there were a ton of them.”

There is an old saw that says women need to be asked to run on average seven times before they will sign on. Not everyone agrees with this, but recent studies from the University of Virginia and Rutgers University in New Jersey show women are far more likely to need to be nudged toward running than will a man.

Freshman Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat, knows that firsthand. A few years ago she was helping to recruit a female candidate to run when then-Assemblymember Mark Stone termed out in 2024, a search that intensified when Stone opted to retire in 2022 rather than seeking a final term. In spite of having 35 years of public service experience – including seven working in the Capitol – she wasn’t even thinking about seeking the job herself.

“I kept asking women and they kept saying no,” she says, but always with the same suggestion: she would make a great candidate.

“It just it kept coming back to me, so here I am,” she says.

“So many women just don’t think of themselves in that way,” says longtime Democratic strategist and fundraiser Katie Merrill. “If you ask a woman who’s a leader in business or a non-profit about running, she’ll so often say she has never even thought about it or doesn’t see how her experience is relevant.”

All the while, Merrill says, a male CEO will almost certainly believe he has the skill set to serve in office without anyone needing to tell him so, and is already thinking about making a run. Pellerin says it goes even deeper than that.

“So often if a job has 10 requirements, a woman will say, ‘I only have eight of these so I’m not qualified, while a man will say ‘I fit one of them. I’m good.’ They’re much more confident in their skills and abilities. And I think that women often question whether we’re qualified,” she says.

Another critical element in getting women to run is getting them comfortable with something many male candidates take for granted – fundraising.

“I literally feel sick to my stomach when I’m calling people asking for money,” says freshman Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo, who represents District 40 in Southern California. “I have a physical reaction to it because I dedicated my career in the labor movement fighting for people to put money in their pockets, so it is so counterintuitive for me to be asking them to take it out of their pockets.”

She recalls one conversation with a potential donor who asked her point blank how much she was looking for. When her answer was somewhat vague, he told her, “You’re going to learn to ask me for a max check soon.”

She says it was a tough lesson, but a critical one because “the verdict on whether or not you’re a candidate that could win or be taken seriously has to do with fundraising.”

It is something even support groups have had to learn on the fly.

“We had an event in 2018 where our key speaker was a newly elected state senator, a super powerful woman who had just glided to victory,” Delano says. “And she totally surprised me by telling this whole room full of supporters that it was so hard for her to get out there and ask for money. She said it wasn’t until she was able to think about it as a ‘we’ and not a ‘me’ that she felt comfortable. That was the big aha moment.”

“What they really need to do is not just recruit women but financially support them and help with the money, because you have to be able to show you are viable.”

It is also why Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an East Bay Democrat, says that while groups like Emerge and Close the Gap are critical to encouraging good female candidates to run, she wishes they could go the extra step and help them raise money, especially early in a campaign.

“What they really need to do is not just recruit women but financially support them and help with the money, because you have to be able to show you are viable,” she says. “Which is why we as a Women’s Caucus have been really deliberate around trying to support more women in these races. And our endorsement is critical because what comes with that also is our ability to fundraise, when we support women, we often then give them double max out checks.”

In a state that leans as blue as California, fundraising can be even more challenging for a Republican, particularly if they are running in a Democratic district, says Molly Parnell, president of Golden State Strategy Group, which supports GOP candidates.

“Regardless of who you are or what you’re running for as a Republican, fundraising is always a challenge,” she says. “It’s hard for anybody to ask somebody else for money to support a political campaign. As we know, campaign donations are not tax deductible, so you really have to find people who have a personal or professional interest in helping you run for office. I encourage my clients to give donors a reason to invest in them because if you can give them that reason it is a lot easier.”

Regardless of party, the benefits of raising money early are numerous.

“Raising money is a huge piece of this because there are plenty of times when, by the time a guy puts out that he’s running for that seat, he’s already lined up all these contributors and locked in all these endorsements and then just blows the competition away. So we’re finding that we need to really be working sooner, more effectively, and really building our coalitions and be ready to fight back,” Pellerin says.

There is also the not insignificant challenge that many female candidates run into – defying the so-called local “king makers” who Pellerin says “pick and choose who’s going to be elected to what positions, and then basically tell women, ‘It’s not your turn’ and to stand down.”

And as Sen. Janet Nguyen, an Orange County Republican, learned early on, standing up for yourself in those situations can be unnerving at best. Her first race was for a City Council seat in Garden Grove in 2004. She emerged victorious from a field of nine candidates, becoming the youngest Council member ever elected and the first woman to hold a seat there in over three decades. She says she heard a lot of the same things other female candidates hear – you should be home having kids, not running for office – but she ignored it all and just went about her campaign.

“Raising money is a huge piece of this because there are plenty of times when, by the time a guy puts out that he’s running for that seat, he’s already lined up all these contributors and locked in all these endorsements and then just blows the competition away.”

Things got more intense when she decided to run for an open seat on the County Board of Supervisors in 2007, which drew the ire of her own local king maker.

“I was told, ‘You run for supervisor, you’re going to lose. And when you do, I’m going to write a blank check and I’m going take you out of office for your [City Council] re-election. And by the way, go back to wherever your husband came from, because I’ll guarantee you’ll never get a job again in Orange County.’”

She says she was also told by the same man that he would make a point of coming after her in any of her future election bids.

“And to this day, he’s ran an opponent against me or helped Democrats against me in all fourteen of my elections,” she says.

While that sounds very personal, she says it was more about her upsetting the self-appointed political hierarchy.

“I was this young Asian-American woman,” she says. “I don’t come from wealth and I don’t come from a political family. I just wanted to serve. And I was told that I had to pay my dues, whether that is donating to causes, or the assemblyman. He’s known as the godfather of Little Saigon and you only run when he tells you that you can. And he picks and choose who gets to run. It wasn’t my turn.”

She won’t name names, but it is public record that she beat Dina Nguyen, the hand-picked candidate of former Assemblymember Van Tran, in the 2008 election.

Former Colorado Senator Morgan Carroll understands all of these challenges better than most. She served in the Colorado Legislature from 2004 to 2017, including two years as President of the Senate, then another five years as the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party. As such, she has received a lot of the credit for helping to build the infrastructure necessary to make female candidates more competitive, and always with an eye toward reaching gender parity in the legislature. That vision was rewarded last November when Colorado became the second state, after Nevada, where women have achieved legislative parity with their male colleagues.

“I was told, ‘You run for supervisor, you’re going to lose. And when you do, I’m going to write a blank check and I’m going take you out of office for your [City Council] re-election. And by the way, go back to wherever your husband came from, because I’ll guarantee you’ll never get a job again in Orange County.’”

From her perspective, California is doing all the right things to get there too. But looking back, she says she would urge the support groups like Emerge and CWLA to make sure their candidates understand more than just the challenges of raising money and balancing family. They also need to understand that a woman’s life will often be judged differently and more harshly than a man’s life will be.

“Women need to be prepared for the possibility that their private lives or abortion history or dating lives or their weird exes could all come into play and their reputation publicly assassinated,” she says. “And it’s not enough just to tell people to have thick skin and deal with it. These groups need to teach women how to prepare their family for what’s coming and coach them on how to pre-release anything that is maybe a bumpy part of their history so they can instead make it part of their narrative. And to also get people mentally ready so that they know what to expect if they’re on a seat where attack ads are likely possible.”

Carroll says negative ads are far more likely to come when a race is expected to be competitive, so this kind of preparation is vital to helping a candidate in those situations.

There are of course a multitude of events or circumstances beyond gender that will determine the outcome of future legislative and statewide races. Much of the surge among Democratic women has been fueled by anger over the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and ensuing events like the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. How long that anger bump lasts is yet to be determined.

Parnell understands the motivation of women seeking to protect their body autonomy, but she says many voters, regardless of gender, are driven by issues that are just as personal to them, such as public safety, reducing homelessness, and dealing with California’s major issues around affordability.

“Women need to be prepared for the possibility that their private lives or abortion history or dating lives or their weird exes could all come into play and their reputation publicly assassinated.”

But Pellerin for one is very confident the momentum swing in women’s favor under the Capitol dome is only going to pick up steam.

“I think that we’re going to bust the numbers,” she says. “We’re going to be beyond 60. We will have a majority of women in the California state legislature.”

The cause got a major boost in recent days by announcements from Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis and former State Controller Betty Yee, both Democrats, that they are running to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2026. There is much speculation that current Senate pro Tem Toni Atkins of San Diego, among others, will join them. If one of them were to win, she would become the state’s first female governor, a possibility that is likely to drive a larger than usual voter turnout.

In that spirit, Nguyen has some simple advice for any woman thinking about running for any public office.

“Aim high and just run. And regardless of the naysayers and the noises around you, just run till you finish and win it. Be proud of yourself. Aim high, work hard and get there. And when you get there, do well.”

Note: A Capitol Weekly analysis of California Secretary of State data showed 125 women ran in a legislative primary in 2022, just under 40 percent of the 317 total candidates. According to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, 83 made it to last November’s General Election, either as challengers or incumbents, with 44 winning. CW correspondent Brian Joseph contributed data analysis to this story.