Surge in Hispanic, Black women in midterm race, but no parity yet

By Marta Garde

Washington, Nov 2 (EFE).- A record number of Black and Hispanic women candidates are running for office in this year’s midterms in the United States but the political glass ceiling of representation remains unshattered.

Data from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) reveals that 28% of the congressional candidates are women — one percentage point less than in the previous elections of 2020.

The candidates for Senate also saw a decrease in the number of women, 21.7% compared to 23.9% two years ago.

The elections on November 8 will completely renew the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate seats, the governorships of 36 states and three territories, as well as hundreds of local official seats.

There has also been some progress for women in the race for these elections, according to figures from the CAWP website: 134 Black women are running for Congress and 22 for Senate, 17 and nine more respectively than last time.

But women still face many barriers in US politics, according to Kelly Dittmar, the director of research at CAWP.

In an interview with Efe, she says that women were “excluded from the start,” not being able to vote until 1920, therefore all the public institutions from before that date “were made exclusively by men and for men, without women in mind.”

She says this sets a precedent for voters to have “stereotypical expectations of elected leaders,” such as “character traits that are more aligned with men and masculinity.”

There are also structural problems, like not having access to the same lobbying agreements, which are fundamental to every electoral race; or the issue of sexism and violence to which the position is exposed.

Currently, 24 out of the Senate’s 100 seats are occupied by women, 16 of them Democrats and eight Republican. In the House of Representatives, 123 of the 435 seats are taken by women, 91 of them Democrats and 32 Republican.

The number of women candidates is uneven between the parties.

Of the Democratic candidates for the House and Senate, 43% and 39% are women, respectively, compared to the GOP’s average of 19% in both chambers. EFE

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