CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Nearly 130 years since the first three women were elected to state legislative offices in the U.S., women remain massively underrepresented in state legislatures.
In 10 states, women make up less than 25% of their state legislatures, according to Rutgers' Center for American Women in Politics. West Virginia is at the very bottom of that list, having just 16 women in its 134-member Legislature, or just under 12%. That's compared with Nevada, where women occupy just over 60% of state legislative seats. Similar low numbers can be found in the nearby southern states of Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana.
"It's absolutely wild to know that more than 50 percent of the population of West Virginia are women, and sometimes I'm the only woman that's on a committee, period," said Democratic West Virginia state Rep. Kayla Young, currently the only woman on the House Artificial Intelligence Committee. Young was one of just two on the House Judiciary Committee when it greenlighted the state's near-total abortion ban.
The numbers of women filling legislative seats across the U.S. have remained low despite women registering and voting at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980 -- and across virtually every demographic, including race, education level and socioeconomic status.
For the past three decades, voters have demonstrated a willingness to cast ballots for women. But they didn't have the opportunity to do so because women weren't running, said Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia.
"The gender gap in political ambition is just as large now as it was then," said Lawless, adding that women are much less likely to get recruited to run for office or think they're qualified to run in what they perceive as a hostile political environment.
And those running in southern, conservative states -- still mostly Democratic women, data shows -- aren't winning as those states continue to overwhelmingly elect Republicans.
In 2022, 39 women ran as their party's nominee for state legislative seats in West Virginia, and 26 were Democrats. Only two of the Democratic candidates won, compared with 11 out of 13 of the Republicans.
Debbie Walsh, director of Rutgers' Center for American Women in Politics, said there's more money, infrastructure and support for recruiting and running Democratic female candidates. The Republican Party often shies away from talking about what is labeled or dismissed as "identity politics,'" she said.
Larissa Martinez, founder and president of Women's Public Leadership Network, one of only a few right-leaning U.S. organizations solely supporting female candidates, said identity politics within the GOP is a big hurdle to her work. Part of her organization's slogan is, "we are pro-women without being anti-man."
In 2020, small-town public school teacher Amy Grady pulled off a political upset when she defeated then-Senate President Mitch Carmichael in West Virginia's Republican primary, following back-to-back years of strikes in which school employees packed into the state Capitol.
Carmichael took in more than $127,000 in contributions compared with Grady's self-funded war chest of just over $2,000. Still, Grady won by fewer than 1,000 votes.
"It's just you're told constantly, 'You can't, you can't, you can't do it,'" said Grady, who has now risen through the ranks to become chair of the Senate Education Committee. "And it's just like, why give it a shot?"
Tennessee state Sen. Charlane Oliver says she didn't have many resources when she first raised her hand to run for political office. She had to rely on grassroots activism and organizing to win her 2022 election.
Yet securing the seat was just part of the battle. Oliver, a 41-year-old Black Democratic woman, is frequently tasked with providing the only outside perspective inside the Republican super-majority Legislature.
"They don't have any incentive to listen to me, but I view my seat as disruption and give you a perspective that you may not have heard before," she said.
Information for this article was contributed by James Pollard of The Associated Press.