Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, September 9, 1994                   TAG: 9409090086
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

WOMEN'S KEY TO POLITICAL EQUALITY: RUN

That's the simple, but myth-shattering, message of a study of more than 50,000 candidacies for Congress and state legislatures released Thursday by the National Women's Political Caucus.

The report throws cold water on a slew of cliches, ranging from the belief that the odds are stacked against female candidates to the notion that 1992 was a breakthrough ``Year of the Woman.''

The study, written by Jody Newman, executive director of the caucus, says that ``electoral success has nothing to do with sex. ... When male incumbents were compared to female incumbents, men running for open seats to women running for open seats, and male challengers to female challengers, women won as high a percentage of their races as men.''

The reason the road seems rougher for women, Newman said, is that ``most incumbents are men and incumbents win far more often than challengers and open-seat candidates.''

Women now hold 11 percent of the House seats, 7 percent of the Senate seats, 8 percent of the governorships, 22 percent of the seats in state houses of representatives and 17 percent in state senates. The main reason the percentages are so low, the study concluded, ``is not that women candidates don't win elections but that so few women have run.''

After checking the sex of all major-party, general-election candidates for the House since 1972 and for the state legislatures since 1986 - 50,563 in all - the study found a ``striking similarity between the percentage of officeholders at each level and the percentage of candidates who are women.''

The parity in success rates has been there as far back as the study goes, with no indication that voters have become more or less receptive to female candidates.

The main reason that 24 new women were elected to the U.S. House in 1992's ``Year of the Woman'' was that the number of women running for open seats, which rarely had topped 10 in the previous 20 years, jumped to 39 - 22 of those were successful.

Harriett Woods, president of the caucus, said she hoped the study ``may change the thinking of media pundits and women themselves'' and encourage more women to run for office.

Newman said that studies she began a decade ago and others have continued to show that, when incumbency factors are discounted, women have as much success in fund-raising as men do. ``Now we also know they have as much success at the ballot-box,'' she said.

Indeed, in open-seat races where a woman faced a man, women won more than half the time.

Women do seem to be disadvantaged in that female incumbents at all levels are more likely to be challenged than males.

Keywords:
POLITICS