The political gender blender: We're not there yet

On Friday, the Showtime cable-television channel will air "Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way," a documentary about her 1984 race for vice president. Although she was defeated, it was a seminal moment in politics that was validated by the subsequent extraordinary leap in the number of female officeholders.

In three decades, political women have gone from anomalies to mainstream, though they still are underrepresented. The odds are the Democrats will nominate a woman for president in two years, and there's an even chance the Republican candidate will tap a female running mate.

The best research on these issues is from the Center for American Women and Politics, a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

When Ferraro was picked as Walter Mondale's running mate, she was one of only 22 women among the 435 members of the House of Representatives. There were only two senators: Republicans Nancy Kassebaum and Paula Hawkins.

Now, there are 79 female representatives and 20 female senators. In 1984, there was only one female governor, Martha Layne Collins of Kentucky. It was only 10 years earlier that Americans elected the first female governor who didn't succeed her husband: Connecticut's Ella Grasso. Since then, 29 women have served as governors.

California and New York (and Minnesota, too) have never had a female chief executive, while Arizona has been governed by women for the past 17 years. There are almost twice as many female state legislators today as there were in 1984.

Yet for all that progress, women occupy only 24 percent of state legislative seats and 10 percent of the governorships, and they account for less than 20 percent of Congress. They make up 51 percent of the population.

The biggest hurdles for women, Lawless says, are "political recruitment and self-perceived qualifications."

The strides have been politically lopsided, as more Democrats seek and win political office. Most of the governors elected since Grasso have been Democrats, though four of the five incumbents today are Republicans. Female Democrats have an advantage over female Republicans of almost 2-to-1 in state legislatures; that ratio rises to more than 3-to-1 in Congress.

A major reason is EMILY's List, which has been recruiting and training female candidates since the year after Ferraro's historic run. In this cycle, the group is training 1,000 women to run for office, assuring them that they're qualified and in demand.

"Our job is to make at least seven asks" of every possible candidate, says Stephanie Schriock, the powerhouse political strategist who heads EMILY's List.

Women used to have a disadvantage in fundraising. EMILY's List has created a network of donors that has leveled the playing field. Other than President Obama and Rodham Clinton, the two most prolific money machines on the Democrats' side may be Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis.