 I'm Ann Marie Slaughter, I'm the President of New America and it's my pleasure to welcome all of you. This is the kind of event we will be doing much more of with our new bread-winning and caregiving program headed by Liza Monday. And I have to say one of the great pleasures, I've been in office for four months and building this program and trying really to use the program to change the conversation. You note it is not called women and anything. It's not even called work and family because that's often code for women and children. It's called bread-winning and caregiving. It's called, it's premised on the idea that we all are breadwinners and caregivers at different times in our lives. One of the things that that gives on to is that after a caregiving period is finished, there's more time to do things like run for office. And of course many of our female politicians manage to combine being a politician and being a full-time caregiver or what I think of as a lead caregiver because very few of us are really full-time at this point. But it's been very neat for me to see some of my own friends starting to think about running for office precisely as their kids go off to college. And it's a wonderful, I think, example when people say, what should I do when I have an empty nest, run for office, change the country. So just two other things that I wanted to say, one other thing. One is I'm reading John Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson. And I grew up in Charlottesville. I could tell you Thomas Jefferson's history backwards and forwards. Never have I seen a biography of Jefferson that points out that he did not go to France the first time he was asked because he wanted to stay with his wife and family. Never have I seen a biography that just describes his complete collapse after the death of his wife and the agreement not to remarry. So this is called Founding Mothers. And there are many different ways, obviously, in which we'd like to see Founding Mothers going forward. But I just would say when we tell history true, when we tell history from the point of view of people who think about caregiving as well as breadwinning, who think about all the dimensions of our neighbor, of our nature, then even the history we know so well with our Founding Mothers looks a little different. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Liza and wish all of you a fabulous panel. And I will be then able to see it on the podcast. Thank you. Yes. Thank you so much for coming. I'm Liza Mundy. I'm the director of the breadwinning and caregiving program here. And I'll introduce our incredibly illustrious panel. I just wanted to say that this event originated with just an idle question that I had had. I'm born and raised in the state of Virginia, live in Arlington. I remember in the 1980s when Mary Sue Terry was elected, Attorney General of the State of Virginia, the first woman we had in our higher state office. And it looked like it might be the beginning of a trend line for women. And it really hasn't been in the state of Virginia. And I periodically have wondered, why has our state not produced more women leaders? Why has South Carolina had a woman governor in North Carolina? What's the difference between our states? What are the paths to progress for women politicians? And then when the state of New Hampshire delivered an entire delegation of women to Congress in the past year, I was thinking, OK, so what's different about New Hampshire? And it just so happened that I posed that question to Alexandra Starr, who is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. And we were just chatting and she said, well, as it happened, I've just written a story about that exact question for More Magazine. More Magazine, which is a great magazine with wonderful smart editors, had thought of that very question and set out to answer it. More is co-sponsoring this event. Nanette Varian, who was Alexandra's editor, is here. So we're very grateful to her for coming down. We're very grateful to More for thinking of this and assigning it to Alexandra, who did a great job on the piece. And she'll be talking about that. So we're very fortunate to have here to answer this very question. Congresswoman Ann Custer, who is from the state of New Hampshire. We have Stephanie Shriak, who is from Emily's List, president of Emily's List. We have Jennifer Duffy, who is a senior editor for the Cook Political Report, where she is responsible for U.S. State and Senate and governor's races. She has 26 years of experience writing about these issues. And we have Representative Shelley Pingree from the state of Maine. And I should say both Representative Custer and Representative Pingree are the first women to represent your districts in your state. So they are very, very well positioned to talk about women's paths to power in different states and the way that these paths are changing. So I think, and then we have Alexandra Starr as well who's gonna talk about her piece. And I'm hoping that it will be a lively and relatively casual conversation, I'll moderate it. But feel free to jump in, to respond to each other, to answer each other. If there's something that you wanna talk about, feel free to have it be a free flowing conversation. But I thought we would start by asking the two members of Congress. And incidentally they will have to leave at about one o'clock. So there will be a graceful exit and we will continue our conversation. Yes, yes, and I should say actually, New America is a non-partisan think tank. We did invite several Republican members of Congress here. It's very difficult for members of Congress to arrange their schedules or even to know whether they'll be available because of votes that are going on. So we invited Senator Ayotte from New Hampshire and several others who just weren't able to be here. But those of us who are reporters and analysts, we will do our best to represent the Republican viewpoint and to make it a non-partisan conversation. So I wondered, we'll start with Representative Custer. If you could just give us five minutes or so talking about how you came to run for office. Happy to do so and thank you very much. It's a great honor and privilege to be here with all of you. And particularly my dear friend, Shelly Pingry, who's been a wonderful mentor. And I wanna say that's probably the most important word that I'll use throughout the conversation. But to be welcomed into the Congress, Shelly reached out even before while I was running and has made a huge difference for me since. And Stephanie Shriak, I definitely couldn't have done this without Emily's list. So I think you're getting a theme. You don't do this alone, you do it, it takes a village. So it's great to be here. So I'm super proud obviously to be a member of this all female delegation with my bipartisan colleagues. So Senator Jean Shaheen, Senator Kelly Ayotte, Carol Shay Porter and myself. New Hampshire is an incredible anomaly right now. We're just very proud of it because our governor is also female. Our Speaker of the House is also female. Our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is also female. So we say in New Hampshire, if you want something done, ask a busy woman. It seems to be working for us. Truthfully, it's no accident. And I think we'll get into it more when we talk about the More Magazine article, which is a great piece. But let me try to identify a few of the elements, some that are unique to New Hampshire, but many that are not. So starting with the one that's most unique to New Hampshire, we have 400 members of our House of Representatives, 24 members of the Senate. So it's always been equal opportunity. My mother was 25 years in the New Hampshire legislature. And when I was a girl, they referred to it as women's work. They don't get paid very much, $200 every two years. But what it means is that, yeah, every two years, whether they need it or not. So what it meant when I was growing up is that it was a lot of women when she was in the New Hampshire legislature. There was more women in New Hampshire than all the other states combined. But what was great is that they proved that they could manage the process, leadership, she was chair of the Ways and Means Committee. She worked long and hard on the tax structure of the state of New Hampshire. And this was true across the board. And so when we got to the modern era, it wasn't a big leap for us to have a Senate president, a female speaker of the House, and then people running for higher office. The other thing that is not unique to New Hampshire, and I think makes an enormous difference, is that the women that went before us were very engaged in building up other women and in reaching out and bringing other women along. My mother, for example, was one of the founders of the National Women's Political Caucus and the Women's Campaign Fund now for them. And she believed very, very strongly that we needed more women in political office. And I can remember as a girl, she would host big events in the summer at our house in the lake and she would constantly be bringing women through. And in fact, when Pat Schroeder considered running for president, she came to our home. And so it was something that I think is lacking in some other states. Our neighboring state of Massachusetts, it's a very difficult environment. We now, Catherine Clark, who was just elected in a special election, is actually the first member of that delegation elected in her own right from the state Senate. Nikki Songus, our wonderful colleague, came up when her husband Paul Songus passed away. But it's a very different environment, just sort of a good old boy world. That's a tough, tough nut to crack. The other thing that I wanted to just mention is how women do get things done. And I think when the voters begin to recognize that, and that's obviously happened in New Hampshire, but it's a dialogue and a narrative that I'm sure Stephanie and Shelley and others will speak to. But if you just look at the most recent example of the budget breakdown and the shutdown of the government, voters across the board, male and female, think that Congress is broken. They think that this is dysfunctional, that it's not serving the needs of the people. But what you saw in Shelley's colleagues, Susan Collins and my colleagues, Gene Sheeheen and Kelly Ayotte, was that it was the women that came together and said, we have to take care of this. We have to fix this. And in the House, we have strong relationships among women on both sides of the aisle, working on issues like military sexual trauma and how we treat our veterans. And there are many, many other examples of it. So I'll probably wrap up there, but just to say that I think it does have to do with setting a tone and a tenor that the first few women make an important example. And if they set the tone that they want to encourage others, that makes a tremendous difference. I know as an attorney for 25 years when I came into an all-male profession, some of the women had gotten there and felt like they could make it. What's wrong with you? And it makes a big, big difference if people turn around and reach back and say, I can help you. I want to, just even in the smallest of ways, but they end up being the biggest of ways. For Shelley to invite me to her home was incredibly meaningful for me. And it meant that I started to meet people and get involved in issues that will be with me for a long, long time. So I appreciate it. Thanks very much. Thank you. So I have some thoughts and I'll save them until we start our conversation. And so, Congresswoman Pingree, would you mind just talking about your own, how you got started? Sure, and thank you to Annie for all that nice praise. And thank you for running for Congress and being here with us and Stephanie and Emily's List and all the great supporters that we do have along the way and to everyone else who's here on the panel. This is great. So I'm gonna dig back a little bit deeper. I completely concur with everything that Annie says. But in an effort not to repeat everything, I'm gonna go back to my first election beyond my involvement in local politics. So I first got involved as a state legislator in 1992. So I've got a little bit longer history and I go back to a time where I think it was even a little bit more challenging. Although 1992 was the year of the woman. So there were some interesting factors in. I would say some things we've back slid and some things we're doing fine with. But a little bit of a story and I'm glad that Pat Schroeder got brought up because she is an important part of my running for office. I had three children at the time. I'm trained as an organic farmer. I was running a small business, an organic farm. And the last thing I ever imagined I would do is run for office. But Pat Schroeder came to Maine and she was gonna speak in Portland. And another mother and I decided we would pack up our young teenage daughters and take them down to listen to Pat Schroeder speak. So again, I lived a long way from Portland, Maine. I lived in a very rural, small community. And it was a big deal to take our girls out to go do this thing. And Pat Schroeder gave a wonderful speech to people, a wonderful role model in Congress. And she said, one of the most discouraging things, this is 1991 or so, is that good people don't wanna run for office anymore. It's not a revered thing to be in Congress. Welcome to my current world. But young people don't wanna do this. And I happen to be on my local school board. So I love local politics. I thought that was the most fascinating thing to get with your friends and neighbors and figure out how your kids should be educated. I just thought it was the greatest thing. And I thought who would ever not wanna be in an opportunity to do something so great. I walked out with my daughter and a woman who was serving in the state Senate came up to me. So another woman came to me and she had been to my vegetable stand. So she knew who I was and she knew I was from Knox County, Maine. And she said, hey, we can't find a candidate in your district. You should think about running for office. So immediately in my head, I said, my goodness, I got a small business. I live in a tiny little community. And I've got at least kids. I can't possibly do that. And I turned to my daughter, who was about 13. And I said, Hannah, what do you think? And she said, mom, I think you should go for it. And it was one of those things which completely doesn't fit into the mold. And I think this is still often true for women. And the first thing you think about is all your other obligations. Who would make lunch for my husband? Who would take care of my kids when they got home from school? What about my employees? What would my community say? And it was a real struggle in my mind. And the most important thing was that I realized this is a great opportunity. And this could be a really amazing thing to do. So thanks to my daughter and to another woman suggesting that I run, only later did I find out that I would be running on the Democratic ticket. And this was a profoundly Republican and independent district. It was only 20% Democrat. So of course they couldn't find a candidate. And I was a total long shot. I had never been registered in a party in the Democratic Party. I had never gone to a party function. And I think all that was to my advantage. I didn't know I wasn't supposed to. I didn't know all the party leaders. I didn't know who they wanted to choose. I put together a little volunteer crew. One of the things about running for the main legislature, it's not quite as big as New Hampshire. But you are expected to go door to door. I had 21 communities, little tiny rural towns. My good fortune was that I happened to run a knitting business. So selling knitting products and also my little farm. So I would go to people's doors. And lovely old ladies would say, you're the knitting woman. Or other men would say, well, you're a small business owner. And interestingly, just a couple other points. I did not take all the advice from the party because there was a lot of sort of givens. You don't do this in a Republican district. You should be much more moderate. You should do all these things. And you should never say you're pro-choice. My opponent was staunchly anti-choice. He had served in the house. He was trying to move up to the Senate. For all intents and purposes, the incumbent. And I thought, well, I've got to run as a woman. I've got to run as exactly who I am, a left-wing liberal. I've got to run on all these things that I believe in. And frankly, in the end, I think it was women in my district, whether they were 82 or 22, who said, this is our opportunity. I crushed my opponent, 62% of the vote. And turned everybody around about maybe a Republican district could be represented by a Democrat if she got out her votes and the people that she wanted. Now, I do want to say, I think one of the biggest challenges for women is often what goes on in our own heads. I just gave you 100 reasons why I didn't think it would go over too well in my family or my community. And there were a lot of people in my little town who say, well, you can't do this. What will happen to your family? What will happen here? And I distinctly remember we would go to all these town meetings. And my opponent, who was probably in his 60s, he ran an important construction company in this district, the name was on all the trucks. He came in in an appropriate little trench coat and a hat. And I walked in and my corduroy pants and my jacket, whatever it was I was wearing that day. And I looked at him and I thought, well, he belongs in the legislature. He looks exactly like what a state legislator looked like to me, a state center. That's how they should dress. And I'm just somebody's mom with the wrong kind of shoes and the wrong this. And what do I know? And in the end, as long as I could keep myself convinced that I had the right to run and that people would actually vote for me, in the end, people were ready to say, this is over. He stumbled over a few things along the way, often because he would sort of criticize me as a woman business owner, what you know. And it all worked to my advantage. But I will just say that I think, often it is the challenges of what you convince yourself you can't do. I could never raise that much money. I could never possibly pull all these things together. I don't know enough people. And I also have read and seen that maybe one of the reasons women do better in certain states is because there's less of an influence of a strong party. Now, I don't know what New Hampshire is exactly like. We're all New England. But Maine didn't have a strictly organized party system that you had to work up the ranks and somebody was going to tell you what you couldn't do. And often the women who do our right are the ones who just jump in anyway. So I would say some of those things, we have some of the same traditions as New Hampshire because we're New England. We've had a lot of women who serve on their local boards, who do all these other things in local government. We have 400 small municipalities. So we're a state of small towns and we're used to women being in those positions. And I do think not unlike New Hampshire, it gets people used to this idea. But I'll stop there. Those are some of my big facts about New Hampshire. Well, that's great. I think we have a clear path to success now. It helps to have a mother who was early involved in politics. And that's right, and have a file card, which you haven't talked about. The file cards that you found that your mother had kept of all the Christmas cards that she sounded with careful annotations about newborns and divorces and this like treasure trove of political conduct. So that's one good path to success. Being a knitter, being known as a knitter is also really good. So we have- And I should have said, I forgot to conclude, I have the opposite situation as Annie, when I ran for the United States Senate in 2002 and lost and later came back to run for Congress, my daughter came home from college. This was the daughter who had then grown up and came to work for me. She was ready to go to law school. She said, I'll take a little break and work for your campaign. And then luckily for me, about a year into it, somebody tried to recruit her for running for the legislature. And she came to me and I got to say to her, yeah, Hannah, you should go for it. And my daughter became the youngest speaker of the house in the main legislature and then was term limited after eight years. So it is a nice little mother-daughter story. I didn't have a mother in politics, but I now have a daughter who'll. Okay, so we are- Mark my word, she will run against me any day, but I'm still here. So Alexandra, based on your reporting about New Hampshire, perhaps you can help us find the patterns here in terms of what the formulas for success is for women, how it's changing and what the, and you talk about and some of the internal barriers that there are external barriers, we'll talk about those, but maybe you could talk about some of the internal barriers as well. You've probably heard the line that when, when a man looks in the mirror, he sees a state senator, he sees a future US senator. And that's not really the case for women so much. What is interesting to me is that you are beginning to see a change with my generation. So the two youngest female senators are Senator Gillibrand and Senator Kelly Ayotte who represents New Hampshire, so I spent some time with her for this piece. And their trajectory into office is a little more reminiscent of what you see with male colleagues over the past several decades. So oftentimes they'll serve as a prosecutor or in the case of Senator Gillibrand, she worked for a high-powered law firm, she became a powerhouse fundraiser, she moved to a district where there was a vulnerable Republican incumbent and she beat him and she, you know, she really also did a very good, there's a competitive situation she'd become the replacement for Hillary Clinton in the US Senate and, you know, she aggressively campaigned for that and she got that as well and then won in a landslide. So when I see those trajectories, you know, those women both have young children and they're serving in the US Senate. Historically, when you saw women in very high positions of power like say Madeline Cunin who served as governor of Maine, their trajectory was a little different. They, yeah, Vermont, sorry, Vermont. Their trajectory was different. You know, they started, it was sort of like an extension of their volunteer work is how they got into public life. So Governor Cunin first got interested or attended her first town hall meeting when she began to campaign for sidewalks for her kids because she felt it wasn't safe for them to walk to school. And because in some of those New England states, as you said, Massachusetts is a different beast. But in those states, the pay is so low to serve in state legislators. It's a pretty, that ramp on makes a lot of sense to be involved in your community, meet a lot of people, you know, marshal those volunteers, that really can serve as the base for a political campaign. So that I think makes Maine and New Hampshire to a service that Vermont's unusual. When you look at states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, you know, they're, female representation of that in those states is pretty terrible. And a big reason for that is that this old boy machine that dominates the parties really decide who gets to run, period. So, you know, it's kind of stunning, but 19 of 20 seats in the Pennsylvania delegation are held by men. So, that's sort of what I've seen, like there's just such a barrier in some cases to even get in the game. Interestingly, those legislatures to be a state legislator actually pays a living wage. You can support a family off of it. So that's another reason that men have sort of dominated in those states. It's changing. And I imagine that with younger women, you know, feeling, well, you know, I went to law school. I have this big prosecutor, you know, I'm doing well. Like, why not me? We'll see more of that. But, you know, in some states, the system really is stacked against them. That's really helpful. There's an irony about the fact that the states that pay so little to their legislatures, that in fact turns out to be an entry point for women. That if you're not thinking of yourself as a breadwinner necessarily, so you can do this volunteer, in a way almost volunteer job. I don't know, there's an irony there that I'm having sort of a hard time making sense of. It is interesting that it needs something else. So Colorado for the last decade has been fighting with New Hampshire on the percentage of women in their legislature. First, second, they take turns. You mean buying? By how many women are in their legislature. Colorado is almost always number one in the country. Wow. Colorado, however, does not have the same type of success record when you look at their congressional races, their senate races, their governorships. So it isn't just that. That is a piece of the story. But I think you heard, particularly as Annie was talking about it, the importance of having someone there to grab your sister and bring them in. That there's a network building and as Emily's list has been now working at this for 29 years to ensure that these two women and so many others have had the opportunity, what we have found most helpful in recruitment is to have other members who are serving in Congress today get on the phones and say this is what it's like. And it's helping specifically with mothers of young children. Because we now have enough examples of women who are serving with young children who can really talk about, well, this is what it's like. You can choose to keep the kids in the district, you can move them to DC, here's the schools, here's the options, this is how we handle childcare, this is, you know, grandma's involved, grandpa's involved, dad's involved. Well, someone's gonna be involved. But those are conversations that didn't happen 20 years ago. And we have a exceptionally large number of women running this cycle in 2014 with young children in tow, including one in Iowa, who by the way, when she wins, Stacey Apple, she'll be the first woman, and I've noticed this in your story, the first woman ever elected from Iowa to Congress, period, or in governorship. I was one of two states in the union, by the way, that has not succeeded in doing so. Yes, Mississippi is the other one. My grandmother hates this fact, because she lives in Iowa. Well, we're gonna fix it, Stacey Apple, six children. Six children. Now, that's a whole nother story, and I'm not quite sure. Yeah, look at that. That keeps me hanging. But it's quite astounding. Michelle Nunn has two little ones running for United States Senate, Georgia. But there's just the great network of support that helps these women out. And so, Jennifer, could you talk about, I don't know whether it's a bi-partisan network of support or not, but could you talk about sort of Republican strategies for recruiting women? Kathy McMorris Rogers gave the response to the President's State of the Union address. She has three small children, all of whom she had while she was in office. And I think she's been instrumental in recruiting Republican women. Could you talk a little about whether there are different strategies between the parties? Yeah, absolutely. Well, yes. But first I wanna say that when you ran for the Senate in 2002, you came to see me. And you brought your daughter Hannah. And when you left, I looked at a colleague, and I said, candidate in training. It didn't take long for you. Me to be proven right, but I have to say that Democrats have a much better infrastructure for women candidates than Republicans do. Although, regardless of party, women face the same challenges. I mean, there are so-called Republican machines. They tend to come in the form of county. You know, the Allen Wood County Republican Party and sort of go through that. You're starting to see some groups crop up. Some of them are, you know, will help any Republican woman. Some of them are very conservative to help them raise money. But Republicans have never been able to replicate Emily's list as much as they've tried. But the other thing I'm seeing pop up, and I think it'll be successful, depending on the state, depending on who's involved, are groups that want to do more than just raise money. You know, a friend of mine started about, she did this in 2008. She started in Virginia, the farm team. And the idea wasn't so much to raise money. I mean, Mary Suterre was part of this, so years. But to get women who'd worked on campaigns, run for office, to sort of be coaches. You know, this is what you do. This is how you answer and attack. This is how you do these things. And women of both parties need more of that. Women who have experience, who've done it. Because you can't answer the phone call of every woman candidate with a question you'd never leave your office. That does sort of happen now. Right, but wouldn't be nice if somebody was, somebody, so there is a group called Emerge, and we'll see how they do. Well, and it's interesting, I'm glad you brought this up, because Emily's list, for those of you who don't know, started 29 years ago because there was literally nowhere for a democratic woman to go to get any financial resources. Just nowhere to go. And so a group of women came together and said, well, we will be that source of money. And so that's how it started. And it started with the election of Barbara Mikulski, our first big victory, and has continued with 19 democratic women to the Senate and 101 to the House. But as the years went on, we realized there were so many other things. It wasn't just about the money. Because after the mid-90s, we realized we didn't have enough women in the pipeline to run. So we had this network, but we needed to start trainings. And so Emily's list, now 15 years ago, started our political opportunity program, trained over 8,000 women. In partnership with Emerge and other organizations around the country to just get the idea started and to start building those networks. You put 45 women in a room in Maryland, which we just did a week ago. I mean, not only do we want each and every one of those women to run, but now they know each other. And they can support each other. And that's the best part of this growing network. So why has it been harder for Republicans to create something like Emily's list? First of all, Republicans generally don't like institutions here. Because I even find that with even things like super PACs and campaign committees. And it's just very hard to centralize anything in the Republican Party. So I think that that's been a challenge. It's not that they haven't recruited women. It's not that they haven't supported women. But there's no Emily's list handing them women ready to run for office. But I still think that they come from the same opportunities that Democratic women do. I call it climbing the ladder. A lot of them have held office. I looked at candidates running for the Senate. This time women. And I counted nine who I consider credible competitive candidates. Because not every woman is, like not every man is. And seven of those nine hold or have held office. There are only two that are kind of new to the process. So there is a process of climbing the ladder. And I think that that's true both parties. And it's interesting, though. The states that do a pretty good job of sending women congressional delegations, they do tend to be bipartisan. I mean, Washington state has sent a number of women and not just Democratic women. So you do, again, sort of wonder if there's something about certain states. Redistricting has a little something to do with how a state as blue as Washington could send Republicans to Senate. And I have to tell you, seniority has something to do with it, too. I mean, you were talking about a state like Vermont that hasn't sent a woman to Congress. But I can count on one hand, because it only has one congressional district. So Tuesday I was one congressional district. I can count on one hand the people who have served in those roles for the last 50 years. They get here and they don't leave. There's very little turnover, which makes it difficult for women to move when there's. It's not really a glass ceiling. It's a seniority ceiling. It's an incumbency ceiling. Yes, it's an incumbency ceiling, which we're much better. We're very happy. We have two incumbents sitting here. I want to know. Yes. But it's interesting, in New Hampshire, where we have two districts, even though the states are very similar, similar in size, but we have two districts and they have swung wildly back and forth. There's been more turnover in these two districts probably than any other two next to each other over the last 10 or 15 years. And in some ways, yes. I mean, I came in because it was an open seat. And I ran the first time I was elected, but I was able to jump in. And back to Shelly's point about party, I didn't have anything to do with the party. And I think it was great because I didn't know any better. And I didn't listen to anybody saying it's not your term because it didn't interest me whose turn it was. And if I had listened to that, I would never have gotten off the dime. And interestingly enough, because we have so many women in politics, most of the candidates that people talked about were women. And I knew how much work it was going to be. My mother had run for the seat in 1980. I knew what it took to raise the money. And I said, OK, well, let me know when they decide. And in fact, in the meantime, I just got organized and got it done. And these open seats are where the opportunity so often lies for women in particular. It is easier to win an open seat than to be an incumbent. It's not impossible to be an incumbent, but it's just easier. And so as we look at this as Emily's list, we're always tracking the open seats. And we were just talking back. I said, there's been like nine house retirements in the last four weeks. We're really busy at Emily's list right now. Because these are the opportunities. But I also want to point out that it also means we run a lot of primaries. And this is really important to realize of the, I believe, 16 new Democratic women elected last cycle, eight of them came through primaries. Eight of them. And that's something we're still contending with. Folks are like, well, why are you running in a primary? I'm like, well, why won't they clear it for us? That's what I want to end up. Hey, they're the men all the time. And they do try to clear it. I get calls about clearing primaries. We choose not to. We like what I think. And I think they're healthy for the party, frankly. But I think you're also true to your mission. And the Hawaii Senate primary, I'm sure that you are under a lot of pressure to get out of that. Because it's an appointed incumbent. But you start to your principles. You've got to do it. And there you have a really strong candidate there. I would say, too, nobody ever wants to get into a primary. It always sounds easier if they clear the field. Although I think it does sometimes strengthen your race because you've been out there for a while. But I was in a six-way primary of Democrats. I was the only woman. So that was one of those moments where, having five men against a woman, there's just a, I was the first woman elected in that district. But I think that actually helped me because people would say, well, there's some great men. Many of them I'd served with in the legislature. We are politically quite similar. But people would say, well, it's time to have a woman. So I do think it was useful to me in a multi-candidate primary. In my case, if they'd cleared the primary, I would never be here. I was running against a female candidate. But having hung in there and having the primary, I won 72% of it. So I mean, sometimes it's just as well not to, which is to give everybody a chance, let the voters decide. And just to make sure everybody knows what it is to clear a primary, that means to... To discourage the other candidates. Right, right, right. To ask the other candidates. Which you kind of need a party boss to do that. Right, right. There's no, and sometimes I think people have a myth that there is a party that people sit down and everybody comes to an agreement and says, okay, you can run. I mean, it's a rare state where that's highly functioned. So, A, it rarely will happen. B, there aren't that many people who will say, if asked, okay, I'll get out. I mean, it's your time. Or you need a leader of the party who can sort of say, we really need you to sort of step aside this time. And a lot of states have that. I think that Republicans in New Hampshire had that for a while. But those are sort of getting fewer. I mean, I don't think any Democrat in New York can run with that. And there's too much permission. But he has female people he mentors, right? Like, Kristen Gillibrand, sort of equal opportunity. You know, your comment about your primary made me think of Carol Shea Porter. She's the other congressional representative from New Hampshire and she ran in 2006, which ended up being a phenomenal year for Democrats. But she ran against the party's choice, right? She was serving in the state legislature and she raised money in like $10 increments. She went all over the state. No one gave her a chance and she won that primary, which really shocked people. It shocked everybody. And then she won the general election, which was probably the biggest upset of that cycle. So- Best Ed ever, it was just her mother sitting on a couch saying why she thought she'd do such a great job. It was like totally homemade. Everybody's like, are you kidding me? And people loved it. And is that the main thing that people credit for her victory? What in retrospect do people see as those? I mean, it was symbolic. She was contrary to every rule and lesson and she does it her own way. And one of the things that I have learned is that the voters truly appreciate authenticity. And that's, I think women have an advantage if they play to their strengths. Shelly's story, you know, you're gonna have other people telling you, oh, you can't be pro-choice. You know, it's a Republican district. And Shelly's saying, no, no, no, I'm gonna be true to my values. And every time you're true to your values and your character and your temperament, whatever the voters can tell. And as I say to my staff and it has the added advantage of being true, it's easier to remember. It's easier to remember. Yeah. It is that if you are true to yourself, they can tell the difference. And Carol, Shay Porter is very true to herself. And it doesn't work in every cycle. She was knocked out once and she came back. But the voters know that she is true to herself and to them. So what are the key external barriers for women, particularly in these top states like Virginia or Mississippi or whatever, that aren't sending a lot of women either to Congress or to their own higher offices? Or is it just money? Is it just obviously money? Or is it the remnants of machine politics? What would you say? To me, the money is symbolic of why women get knocked out. They're not in the running to be in the running. Either they take themselves out of contention or other people don't take them seriously. And the number one most important thing that Emily's List does for women is to teach them how to be competitive. And the money gets overblown in a sense because it's the only number we have. It's the only measurable we have. So when you're months and months, if not years out from the election, to be in contention is to be the one that every three months, we're measured. And if you don't participate in that, people can dismiss you very easily. But if you can crack the code, and I think women can, I think women can be very, very good at this. And it's because we tend relationships. It's because of the Christmas card list. It's because of the knitting and the we tend relationships. And if we can help women to cross over to the place, I was talking about it with a colleague at the gym this morning, and she said, think about it. Nobody else can pick up the phone and ask people for money, and we're not selling them anything, and they send you money. And I said, yes, but we are. We're selling a better America. And I frequently will sign this on the phone in a fundraising call. It's not for me. It's for America. If you believe in our mission of a better, more functioning, higher functioning Congress, then participate in this. Be a part of this. But I think that women do it in a different way, and my goal is to help candidates acknowledge, do it in a way that is within your comfort zone. If hitting people up the way guys do is not in your comfort zone, it's not gonna work in the long run. But if nurturing people and having events and sending thank you notes and being gracious about it works for you, trust me, it'll work for your donors. They'll come back. They want people. They want this institution to work. And we at Emily's List probably spend more time than anything sitting with our candidates teaching them how to raise money. Painfully. I mean, some would say it's a painful, wonderful truth about Emily's List. I mean, they do a great job. It is, and we have actually had just an incredible quarter that the end of the year report just came out, and our candidates have done very, very well, which is good, because they're gonna need a little extra boost in 2014. So we do spend a lot of time teaching the basics of fundraising, not just at the congressional level, but like to start earlier, because those holiday card lists are gold mines, and everybody, all women in here should keep them. Now, it's very, very important. I also wanna talk about other external things, and you started talking a little bit about this too, there's just, there are districts in this country that have been held by incumbents for a very long time. And it's until those start shifting, it is hard to open the floodgates. And in some places, there's now a bottleneck. There's gonna be a lot of people. For instance, in our backyard, from where we're sitting right now, Virginia, Jim Moran retired, and there are 13 or 14 people seriously thinking about running for Congress in the Democratic primary in that district, because it's been so long. And then all of a sudden, and there's one woman in that mix right now, but at this point, I don't know how much that's gonna change, there may be someone thinking about it right now, but no, there's a wonderful Assemblywoman Herring who's seriously thinking about African American women, very, very strong candidate. So we might be in a position where there is only one, and that actually makes it easier for Emily's list. But think about that. 13 people have been sitting, waiting for this one, because it's been so safe. And that is a place where it is hard. And in some states, it's much, much worse than even Virginia. In Northern Virginia, we have two seats that are gonna open up for us. And one of which is not necessarily Republican, right? No, I have to, well, one's definitely all Democrat. The other one's, it's just a swing. The Republicans got a very strong woman, and that's... They did, they did. They recruited a very strong woman, and we put that seat as leaning Republican today, so Democrats are gonna... Sorry. Democrats are gonna have to fight for that one, they're gonna have to fight for that one a little bit, but this has been, this is again, somebody who, you know, Barbara Comstock has been very dogged in sort of pursuing her career. She is a veteran of tough races. Right, she is currently in the state Senate. Yes, okay. So Virginia, so the incumbency, it's sort of like in an office, right? When the senior management is all male, and you have to sort of wait until people retire, but incumbency is such a powerful force, right? In American politics, and I don't know if it's become more powerful, if it's always been powerful, but that is one big barrier. You can probably argue it's actually a little bit less powerful today than it used to be. That it used to be, you know. And part of it's the party structure, part of it's the cost of races, and folks are frustrated about Congress right now, so you're seeing some retirements, and hopefully not too many more, but that's part of what's going on. So there's a little bit more movement in these races than there has been, but that being said, there's still a huge advantage, and we've got a redistricting problem, where we now have really safe Republican districts, and really safe Democratic districts, and very few, very few, excuse me, a couple in the middle to fight over, and so that means we're fighting in primaries, and Republicans are fighting in primaries, and so as you talk about how women do in this environment, now we do have a partisan problem. So Congress is about 19% women, but if you look at the Democratic caucuses, we're 30% women. So the Republicans are far, far behind, and so in a world where we have only safe Republican districts, and we don't have any movement to get women into these races, we have a big structural problem, and folks will ask me, what can we do? And I said, well, they need a real version of Emily's list now. They need to put pressure on the party. So all the redistricting to make these seats safe has been not good for female candidates then. It's something you're saying. Well, I would beg to differ. In my class, so I came in in 2012, it's a huge class, 85 new members, and more had been added since in specials, and we started out with 18 Democratic women, three Republican women, so that'll give you a sense of the difference, but definitely the redistricting helped, was a high number of new seats and a high number of women, and young people and... And when we have a redistricting cycle, so which we just had, because the redistricting happened in 2010, there's a lot of turnover, but there's gonna be less until the next redistricting cycle. It's possible there's a little bit of an ideological factor in there on the Democratic-Republican side. I mean, I think Emily's list and groups, I mean, helping women to learn how to raise money and organizing in states to get a forum team is a huge difference, but if you talk about these extremely partisan primaries, you're just, I think you're just more likely to find women who are comfortable on the left than women who are comfortable on the extreme right. It generally means you have to be anti-choice, it generally means a lot of values that I think there are just less women who subscribe to than men. It's just a little bit of a factor, so it narrows the field that Republicans can recruit from, and I think as they've, a lot of great women who have left Congress, Olympia Snow in my state said she couldn't take the pressure from the right. They don't want to be primaried by the right, and they want to be more of the conciliatory moderate player, so I just think you find more women getting active in politics on the Republican side who that's the persona they want to be, not the ultra-conservative. We have plenty, and I'm not saying it's not a reasonable ideological view, I just think there's a smaller pool. And then of course there's the policies of the Republican Party, which right now are not geared toward advancing women, and we see that not just in the candidates, but in the voters. I mean, that's why so many more women voters vote for Democrats than they do for Republicans. I mean, this is all tied together. Jennifer, would you agree with it? Well, I would agree, but I would also say that the women's vote is not monolithic. I mean, let's look at 2010 and 2012. If you look at the congressional vote, national congressional vote, women actually voted one point more Republican in 2010 than Democrats, but 49, 48. 2012, though, when Democrats successfully talked about the war on women, 55% of women voted with the Democratic Party as opposed to 44. Now, yes, there's a rounding error there. I know it doesn't equal 100. They've voted with Republicans, so that does have something to do with it, and sometimes women on the Republican side can be easily caricatured. I'm thinking about like Sharon Angle who ran for the Senate in Nevada in 2010, who was not a strong candidate, but she had this habit of saying kind of ridiculous things, and it just did out war as a woman, I think, then. And Delaware as well? Okay, yes, there was Delaware. I am not gonna, I am. That's another shade. Yeah, that's just another shade of crazy. Well, come on, I am never in my career going to see another political ad that starts with the line, I am not a witch. There. Never say never. Never say no. I'd like to make a point. One side effect of states where there's a very dominant party that keeps women out, it's interesting, occasionally you'll see women being elected to top offices there from the non-dominant party. So, like Christy Todd Whitman in New Jersey, she had an opportunity to run because the party kind of is fine to take a winger, and then there's an opening and they get elected. So sometimes, it's not entirely clear cut. That's really interesting, yeah, that's a very good point, yeah. Yes, you do all need to publish your book. Thank you very much. Getting us where we are. By all means, bed. Thank you very much. Nice to see everybody. Thank you so much for coming. I wish you a very great fall. Thank you. Can we walk right this way? Yeah. And actually, it looks like we've got about 20 minutes. So I think it would be a good time to open up to questions because we're here for another 15 or 20 minutes and would love to hear what the audience would like to talk about. And I think there's a microphone that's gonna, they threw you in. There we go. Someone lean in. I know, hi. Racial Alliance with the National Partnership for Women and Families, and I already got my Does Policy Matter question in. So I'm gonna ask one having done New Hampshire politics. Is there a role in the presidential, the fact of being a presidential primary state? New Hampshire, lots of women, Iowa, none. Like, what's the impact, no impact? That is very interesting you say that because Senator Ayotte said to me that she thought that was one of the leading factors for the high level of female participation in politics. And her argument was that women get involved so intently every four years that then that creates a base of activism that can be channeled into women's campaigns and their own candidacies. But that's a very interesting point that Iowa is so very different. So I'll turn it over to you. You would think that when you hear that about New Hampshire that would make, that makes complete sense to me and yet the opposite has happened in Iowa. I don't know if I have an answer for that because you know massive energy happens in Iowa every single election cycle. Women and men come together to get involved in those caucuses. So there are always other factors involved. In Iowa, there are less opportunities. I mean, it is really something to have 400 house seats in your small state. So there's less, everybody gets to be representative before they're gone, that's the rule. So what I think is going on in Iowa is just how the politics sort of started at the beginning but what we're seeing, here's the good news. Things are changing. I mean, not only do we have Stacey Apple running for Congress, we have three women running in Bruce Braley's open seat. So we have just riches everywhere about this and that's a really, really good sign and so we're seeing a lot more women in the pipeline and this didn't happen overnight. Emily's List and others have been working for years, if not in fact decades in places like Iowa to get those women into a place where they can step up and their state senators running, their state representatives running. So this pipeline really does matter. Not everybody comes from the legislature. I mean, so that is true and women and that's the other thing I think is so exciting right now is women are coming from so many different aspects of life to run for office. That's really good. I mean, to see Michelle Nunn step up as a successful CEO and president of Points of Light Foundation to run for this United States Senate seat, I just, I think it's fantastic and she has a real shot of winning Georgia. Just like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts in a state that had never elected a woman to the United States Senate until Elizabeth Warren. So we're seeing different folks able to get into these race and really change the dynamics. That's really good. In the front. I'm Nancy Carson, I'm a freelance writer. Michelle Nunn had a little something going for her to begin with. She might be the daughter of a former senator. But she's a daughter of a former senator. So that's good. And that would be in the tradition of women being part of sort of political brands or political dynasties coming from their father. Very good. Alexandra, you were speaking about generational change and it occurs to me, it's a lot of speculation about much younger women and how they're going to view their role and they seem to have a perhaps a changed idea of women's roles, bigger or smaller. And I'd like to know what any of you are finding on college campuses and really young, what I consider really young adults, how they're thinking about politics and running. It's an interesting question, I'm sure. You have a lot to say from the Emily's perspective, but I did a piece about Senator Gillibrand many years ago and interestingly, she and Senator Ayotte did not participate in student government in college. They both were very serious athletes and they both served in sororities. They were active on campus, but not in student government. But when I spoke with all of her college buddies, they said it was kind of on her mind. I think the point is that women now, young women, they have examples like Senator Ayotte and Senator Gillibrand and they're also, they're going to law school and they're going to medical school, so I think it's a natural extension of that to say, well, why wouldn't I run for office? All these other opportunities are available to me. And in 2012, we were able to successfully elect three women to the House of Representatives under the age of 40 for the first time. It's in Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii, who's going to kill me when we get our age run, but I think she's like 32 or three, which is fantastic. And we're seeing more of that. So I think it's a really good, healthy sign. We all have met male politicians who sort of had, this is part of their life plan, like I'm going to practice law for a while, I'm going to do this for a while and I don't want to run for Congress. Women haven't been doing that. And I think both Congress women pointed that out, that it was kind of fell into their lap, so to speak, or was presented as an option to them. But now I think women are putting it into a life plan. Maybe, you know, not in their 30s, but in their, you know, in their 40s, but it's something you can plan that I don't think that they ever thought about before. It's interesting that you all raised law school because law is a profession that has, you know, half of women, half of law students now are female. And since law has tended to be a feeder profession for politics, you would expect that, I mean, unlike, say, business school, business school is still about a third female. Law and medicine have been more conducive to having women come in. So you would think that that would propel, you know, if they're at parody in law school, you'd think that eventually women would be at parody in politics. And, you know, we'll get there, not just with boys. How about in the back and the black sweater? Hi, my name is Jennifer Clark. I'm from the Institute for Women's Policy Research. And on the topic of parody, we've actually projected that at the current rate, women will not reach parody in Congress until 2121, which is over a century from now. So I was just wondering if the panelists could talk about more ways that we could speed up this process. I know we've talked about a lot of different recommendations, trends that are currently going on, but just some ideas about how we can speed it up so that we're not waiting a hundred years for that. You know, I would say encouraging women to run. It's striking. You see, there are studies that have been done showing that women are much more likely to have decided to run. There was a study of women serving in state legislators, both men and women serving in state legislatures. And the women were much more likely, I think 25% more likely to say that they didn't consider it until someone had recommended it to them. So that, you know, telling someone you think is talented and would do well in public life, encouraging them to do it seems to be like it almost opens a window or something within them. I think the report you're referencing is the Rutgers University Report, which also has a great fact in there, which is women just often think they're not quite qualified. You know, if anybody's read, Cheryl Sandberg's Lean In, it's the same thing. Like, we don't have 100% of what the job description is, so therefore I can't do the job. And in this Rutgers report, it talks about how so many men, I mean, it's something like well over a majority of men who claim that they are unqualified to run for office, still would consider running for office. I mean, so there's also that, like we've got to get our head around, like, you know, you don't need to have 100% of the pieces. You know, you just, and this is democracy. We need your voice. That's the most important piece in this. And so it's so true. Recruiting, moving women. We're seeing more and more women running at the legislative level. And so if we can keep that up, we're gonna see, we're gonna speed up this trend line. So we should have a lean-in generation pretty soon of women who read the book and taken it hard. You know, on Democratic side, we had elected eight Democratic mayors in 2013. You know, we've got these great opportunities. We are, you know, we have set goals, you know, within the next, you know, these are bold and, you know, it's gonna take a massive amount of candidates to do it. But, you know, I've said to my organization, how do we get to at least 50% of the Democratic caucus? So we're at 30 at the federal level. How do we get to 50? And how do we do it in 10 years? Now, there are some structural challenges with the districts that are in play to get there. But you can map it out. It is about women saying, yes, I'm gonna run. We need more women to run. I think there's gonna be a couple of good cycles, this being the first one where you're seeing some of these longtime incumbents finally sort of retire. And it's happening in Democratic districts, probably this cycle and next cycle, because they really can't see getting the majority back before the next redistricting, which, you know, unfortunate, but it makes sense. So if you sort of lift the incumbency ceiling in a lot, in more districts, you're going to get more women running from the house. I think that that's important. Senate retirements has been a very big avenue for women. And these last 2012, 2014, you've seen Democratic retirements in 16 and 18, you're gonna start to see some Republican retirements. So those things all help. I think that parody by 2021 is the most depressing thing I've heard this week. Yeah, it is, it's terrible. Yeah, I have a hard time believing it's true. I went back and looked at some history sort of preparing for this. And, you know, when I started working in this game, you know, women made up 6% of the Senate, and okay, now they're 20. At least I saw that in my lifetime. I will see a woman president. Yes, you will. And not only in my lifetime, but probably within the next decade, one way or the other. And I think it's, you know, I think it's great that, at least on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton doesn't want to run. There are a couple of other women out there who are perfectly qualified and do want to run. It's not like Hillary Clinton's unique anymore. And that's bound to accelerate gender parity as well. Do you think? I mean, having a woman presidential candidate or a female president is bound to accelerate female parity, I would think. And so retirement says people get disgusted with partisan politics and Washington retire. That'll leave some seats. And the momentum of seeing women on the top ticket has really mattered. And it's mattered in the States. I mean, having Governor Jean Shaheen in New Hampshire when they did help so many more women go, oh, well I could do that too. I mean, and you often see two women senators in the same state. I mean, Maine, New Hampshire, Washington, California. California. And that's another piece of, oh, well, that's just, we've done that season. We can do that. That, it really opens up the doors. And so to see a woman at the top of the presidential ticket, I think opens the floodgates. I mean, but even if you look at Geraldine Ferraro in 84 and Sarah Palin, I obviously did not support. Last go around, but these cycles after that, you actually saw an uptick of women in their parties running. So whenever you, a high profile female candidate, anecdotally, we've seen an uptick. Oh, that's really interesting. So I think it really opens the floodgates. I think it's great. Oh gosh. You pick somebody, Lana. Yeah. Thank you. I'm Ibrahim Mukman with Mukman and Associates. And I was just wondering if these promising trends are also relevant for African-American and other women of color? Yes, absolutely. Great question. If I'm, yes, I do think that's absolutely right. And we're really, really excited about it. I mean, think about, you know, as I was just talking about Virginia 8 and our assembly woman herring theirs, this is great African-American woman who I just, we're really enthusiastic about. So we are seeing more and more, but we have more work to do. And I would, you know, and I would love, you know, your thoughts separately on this, is how do we find more opportunities, more districts for African-Americans and Hispanics to run in that aren't so specifically drawn but that we can break through? And I think that's the next thing we all have to figure out. We do well in minority majority districts, but we need to do more. And that to me is the question of the next decade or two. How do we figure that out? Cause it's time. Cause the demographics are changing. Hi, I'm Heidi Seek. I'm the COO of democracy.com. And we are a platform that enables candidates to run for office at every level. We have a partnership with Vote Ren lead, the former White House project to work on getting more women elected. But my question was going to be about the young people. I actually want to do a little case study about California and my home state. I've been away for about three years and so something weird is happening in that state. I wondered if you had any thoughts. We had the citizen redistricting commission, which we'd hoped would help the redistricting problem, but we also have all of these women that are running at this very high level. We have the attorney general. We have the two senators. We've got Nancy Pelosi, but we're seeing a reduction in the number of women who are running for state legislature. So I haven't, I mean, I haven't really, I'm worried. It's weird. So I wondered if you had any thoughts about that. The other country, California. It is always interesting when trends, you know, you always assume trend lines will be upward, but not necessarily, so. I can't actually explain the state legislature. I can explain the state senate because there are state senate districts in California that are bigger than congressional districts because there are only 50 of them. So you have to run a congressional level campaign for a state senate seat. So, you know, there's nobody in New Hampshire who's ever run from the New Hampshire state senate that's ever had to raise $3 million. But I think the other thing, the redistricting did help. Okay, well, in the realm of the Cook Political Report, it helped because the more competitive districts, we like competitive districts. So that did help. It was not a very partisan drawing, the citizens. You can actually apply to be on that mission, which I thought was funny. But here's the other thing that I think has made a difference. And that is the switch to top two primary as opposed to a partisan primary. It's a nonpartisan primary, the top two regardless of party move on. So there's less impetus to wait for somebody to retire or it's almost encouraging you to get in the race, to forget about whatever good old boy network or whatever county organization network exists, just get in and run. So I think that that has opened some avenues. I cannot explain the state house. Well, and I can say that Emily's list and partnership with a number of great women's organizations in California have come together to actively recruit for this cycle, the next cycle and many cycles to stem this situation and think we can get in there. I think part of it is that California has always been at the forefront. I mean, there's 60 Democratic women in the House of Representatives today. 18 of those women are from California plus two United States senators. So we were fine, like everything's good, we have all these women out there. And so we probably didn't, you know, just in general, mind the store. And now we really, because we women need to be asked. So you need to be eternally virtual. And so if this isn't, we can't, it never just goes on autopilot. At least not this generation and maybe generations coming up that will change. So there's definitely, the good news is that there's a good group, coalition of groups that have come together to work on this. I'm Valerie Young with the National Association of Mother Centers. I'm excited to hear that there are more women with young children running for Congress. With the, if you study motherhood, you know that there's the Corel report out of Stanford about how mothers are perceived to being less committed and less competent. They're offered jobs less. They're starting salaries or less, things like that. I'm very curious if you can say anything about how motherhood, how the factor of a candidate's motherhood will be handled. Will she similarly be regarded as a less viable candidate or will women find a way to use it? You know, if you can raise a house full of toddlers, clearly you have training for Congress. Particularly this Congress. Parenthood for men, you know, is kind of like a neutral issue. But still women at all, it worked tend to downplay their motherhood. They don't have so many pictures of their children up perhaps. It might not be quite as bad as it was 20 years ago when I started practicing law, but it's still kind of an issue. So how will the fact of a candidate's motherhood play out? I'm so glad you asked that because I was gonna ask that as well. And it's really confusing right now. You look at Wendy Davis in Texas and she's being accused of abandoning her young children when she went to law school at Harvard, even though she was commuting back and forth. I'm not quite sure. And then you have, you theoretically have women who are criticized for bringing their children with them on campaign airplanes and or state funded trips. And it is hard. How is the motherhood thing playing for women? I can tell you that Senator Ayotte pointed out repeatedly that when she was campaigning, she was constantly asked, how are you gonna balance this with two young kids at home? And her point was it just wouldn't have been asked if it was a male candidate. Her husband is actually more or less a stay-at-home dad. I mean like he runs his own business, but he's the one who like keeps things running at home. And that is a pattern with the politicians who have young children that their husbands are taking the lead as the childcare. Very true. I mean it's, well it's the same way. Someone's gonna stay home with the kids. Right. You know, it's not any different. It's just that there's a shift between the mother and the father, right? It's just, so wouldn't you say that the questions are hard? The questions are hard. It is getting so much better. That's the good news. It's getting a lot better, but it hasn't gone away. And they do get the questions all the time. Well who's gonna stay home with the kids? That was always the big one. Now it's more of how are you gonna balance? That's been like the shift in question in the last four years. Who's staying home? Now it's like, oh, how are you gonna balance this? Right, I mean it's not easy. It's not easy. It's not easy for any, to be fair, it's not easy really for any parents of young children in Congress anymore. Because this isn't like it was 30 years ago where they'd move their families here, they'd put them in school here, you never went home. Everybody goes home on the weekends now. Because, electorally speaking, to win your campaigns, to win your next election, you gotta be in your district all the time. So these are real hard questions. I think that we, who work in politics, are gonna start dealing with much, much more. Mothers and fathers. And there's a lot of fathers who are very distraught that they can't get home and see their kids. And their kids are still living in the state. I mean, it's like a center baggage in Alaska. I mean, just in trouble. You're never gonna see the kids. And they figure it out in a partnership. Sort of, it does, as Anne put it, it takes a village. But we need, and they, yeah, they ended up moving. Often they end up moving here. You just have, first of all, you know, who I mean, Alaska's tough. It's a little difficult. I mean, Lisa Murkowski, when she was appointed to the Senate, she went home every single weekend for the time, she was appointed and had to run. And so she went home every weekend and took a red eye back. And she said, part of it is because I need to run, but part of it is because my kids, you know, are young and I'm not gonna go a month without seeing them. But I also know, since I spend most of my time with the Senate, both Senate mothers and fathers who have toy corners in their room, Senator K. Bailey Hutchison, who adopted children while she was in the Senate, had a pack and play. And, you know, that was, you know, when they're in Pennsylvania, that's kind of the way you do it. A lot like moms I know who work in the law firm, you know, the business. Yeah, and in other places, you know, I know moms who, you know, spend their lunch hours with their kids if they're in daycare. And it's just, it's different. But I still think kids are off limits for a tax. I mean, I don't, I've never, unless it's a much older kid who's gotten in a lot of trouble, but by that time, they're kind of on their own, but young kids, you know, they're really off limit to attack. And I mean, I know a couple of candidates who bring their kids to as many campaign events that are fun, you know, they're not bringing them to like policy discussions, but parades. And I mean, they love being in parades. And then I know women who don't want their kids out at all, they want to keep them very separate. So it just becomes a personal choice. It's like a lot of other things. The disservice is part of the story. And I think it is part of the narrative of why these mothers of young children, because there's lots of mothers, but these are mothers of young children. They have a really great story of how they balance it and how they've been successful. And these are a lot of women who have all, they've already been successful, whether they've been running big organizations or serving in the state Senate. So it is part of the story and it's a good part of the story too. Well, there are studies that show that if you're the boss, it's actually easier to balance your family and work responsibilities than if you're the staffer, perhaps with less control over your schedule. Well, thank you all so much for participating. Thank you everybody for coming. We're five minutes over at this point. So I think I should probably end the event. And again, we'll be having lots more in March. We're gonna be looking at the STEM professions and women's progress in the STEM fields and hopefully later on in the year looking at Wall Street and finance. So I hope you'll keep coming back. And thank you again. It was a great panel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.