LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — When Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen recently called a special legislative session to address rising property taxes, it was mostly women who stepped up to push through parts of his flagship bill and block his unpopular plans to raise sales and excise taxes to cover the cost.
Women hold just over a third of Nebraska’s legislative seats, but they dominated the floor most days of the special session. Those who advocate for more women in political office say it’s a sight they hope to see across the country, as burning issues like abortion, family budgets and school curriculum and safety prompt more women to consider running for office.
Republican Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Omaha, chair of the Revenue Committee, introduced Pillen’s major plan for property tax relief. But if she hadn’t tried to lead the powerful committee six years earlier, she might have remained on the sidelines.
She initially resisted the position, she said, because she had only served for two years and had never held a seat on the Revenue Committee before. It was U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer — a former state legislator — who encouraged her to pursue the opportunity, noting that she had been elected Transportation Committee chair years earlier without much experience.
“You still go into rooms where you’re the only woman. Quite often, actually,” Linehan said.
Women have historically been more reluctant than men to seek political office, said Kelly Dittmar, research director at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. That’s still the case, she said, but states have seen a significant increase in women seeking office and getting elected over the past five to six years. Since 2018, the number of women serving in state legislatures has increased from 1,875 to 2,426 earlier this year, a jump of nearly 30%, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
Women’s hesitation to step into office is often characterized as a lack of self-confidence. While that may have been true in previous generations, the more likely reason now is that women rely on what researchers call “relationally embedded decision-making,” Dittmar says.
“Women have told us far more often that they think about how running for office would affect their children and spouses and how it would take time away from the other responsibilities that still disproportionately burden women,” Dittmar said.
Women are also more likely to consider the consequences of sexist and sexual harassment and abuse that come with their work, whether online or from male colleagues, she said.
“Women ask themselves, ‘Is what I can accomplish in the office worth it?’” Dittmar said.
Several women in the Nebraska Legislature are all too familiar with such harassment. Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh, a Democrat from Omaha, was stunned earlier this year when a male colleague mentioned her name as she read a graphic account of a rape on the floor of the Legislature. An investigator found that Republican Sen. Steve Halloran had violated the Legislature’s policy on sexual harassment. But the finding only led the Legislature’s male-dominated board to reprimand Halloran — a move that carried no punitive action.
Republican Sen. Julie Slama, like many of her female colleagues, has endured a barrage of misogynistic comments on social media, including threats of sexual assault, in the five years she has been in office. She was also the target of sexist remarks from a male colleague when then-Senator Ernie Chambers, a Democrat, suggested she had been appointed to her position in exchange for sexual favors in 2019. She was 23 at the time.
Slama, one of Nebraska’s most conservative lawmakers, often joined Cavanaugh and several left-leaning women in the House during the special session to block the governor’s plan to raise sales and excise taxes, arguing it amounted to a tax increase that would hurt working families.
“It’s just so important to have women involved in these debates because it represents a different perspective in Nebraska that isn’t always represented,” Slama said.
Cavanaugh hopes to welcome more women to the Nebraska Legislature next year, but she admits she’s having a hard time convincing women she knows to run for office.
“They say that when men decide to run, they just look in the mirror and decide to run, and a woman has to be asked about five or six times before she even considers it,” Cavanagh said. “I think men are often dismissive of our abilities, but the fact that we can all stand together, even when we’re fighting each other, is what gives us a lot of strength in leadership right now.”
By the end of the month-long special session, the Legislature had passed only a fraction of the 50 percent cut in property taxes that Pillen had requested. A slimmed-down cap on local governments’ ability to raise property taxes remained from Linehan’s original proposal. Included was a measure by Sen. Jen Day, a Democrat, to frontload an existing property tax deduction so that it would automatically be deducted from homeowners’ tax bills.
Other women in the chamber plan to press ahead with their ideas for cutting property taxes during next year’s regular session. That includes a proposal from Sen. Danielle Conrad, a Democrat from Lincoln, to raise additional taxes on households bringing in more than $1 million a year. Another proposal from Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha would be a model for California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 voter-approved law that caps property tax increases.
“Budget and taxes may sound dry, but they are absolutely bread-and-butter issues. It is absolutely kitchen-table economics,” Conrad said.
With 18 of the 49 seats in the Legislature, Nebraska ranks 19th among states in the number of female legislators.
Republican efforts to target diversity and inclusion programs may make it harder for women — even conservative women in GOP-dominated states — to advance in government, said Meredith Martino, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group Women in Government. Earlier this year, Iowa’s Republican-led Legislature repealed an explicit requirement that the state’s decision-making bodies be gender-balanced. In South Carolina, the only three Republican women in the Senate this year lost their primaries.
Figures from the Center for Women and Politics show that among female lawmakers in the US, there are nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans.
“Republicans control about two-thirds of the legislative branch in this country,” Martino said. “Are women’s voices being included in the groups that have the power and make the decisions?”
Five women in the Nebraska Legislature, including Linehan, will not return next year due to term limits. Slama, a new mother, announced she would retire at the end of the year. It’s impossible to know whether women will lose or gain seats in the November elections, but a dozen legislative races have at least one female candidate.
