Monday was Women’s Equality Day, celebrated each year on the anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment. This year mark 104 years since women gained the right to vote.
If you’ve been reading the League of Women Voters columns, you’ll remember that the fight to for female enfranchisement spanned decades (arguably centuries).
Gaining the right to vote was the first step toward achieving equality for women. It gave them a voice in politics and the power to influence the laws and policies that governed their lives. It was the first foot in the door that eventually allowed women into what were traditionally men’s spaces: higher education, politics and business.
We’ve come a long way since the first suffragists met at Seneca Falls and pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony. Now, the Center for American Women and Politics says women make up 25% of the Senate, 29% of the House and 31.9% of statewide elective executives. For the second time in under a decade, a major political party nominated a woman for president, with Kamala Harris clinching the nomination. (A nod here to the “firsts”: Victoria Woodhull, who, in 1872, was the first woman to run for president; Margaret Chase Smith, who received a nomination to run for president at the Republican National Convention in 1964; and Shirley Chisholm, who garnered 151 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention before losing to George McGovern.)
Women have advanced in many other areas as well. In 2021, women accounted for 58% of undergraduate enrollment in universities, as per the National Center for Education Statistics. As of 2022, women make up a slight majority of the college-educated workforce at 50.7%, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2023, there were over 14 million women-owned small businesses, according to Forbes, employing over 12 million people and generating $2.7 trillion in annual revenue.
But we still have a ways to go. Women make up 50.5% of the U.S. population, but make up less than one-third of statewide and national elected officials. Women make up a slight majority of the college-educated workforce, but Pew Research Center says women still make, on average, 82% of what men make for the same jobs (82 cents for every $1). Women own and operate millions of small businesses, but they only received 4.63% of all federal contracting dollars in 2022, according to Forbes. And according to Fortune, women make up roughly 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs. And the rollback on women’s reproductive freedoms will further limit women’s ability to participate and advance in the political and business spheres.
We have come a long way since 1920, and it’s good to recognize the progress we’ve made and the people who worked to get us this far. However, it’s clear that there is still much work left to do, and we must be the ones to do it.
