are there any women here today?
May. 14th, 2008 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacKaren Bass's election as Speaker of the California state Assembly (she's the second woman and I think the third black person to hold the post, but the first to be both) reminded me of a curious fact. I'm civic-minded, or pedantic, enough that when we moved here last fall I checked up on our legislative representatives, and noted that our federal, state, and county representatives - senior US senator, junior US senator, House member, state senator, state Assembly member, and county supervisor - are all women.
Our Assembly member is termed out this year, and the leading candidates to replace her happen to be men, so this situation may not persist for long, but it caused me to wonder: of where else in the US might this also be true? Ah, a research project in political geography, one of my favorite pastimes.
Well, it'd have to be in California, where one-quarter of each house of the legislature, and over a third of the US House members, are women. Two other states have two women senators, but Maine has no women in the US House, and Washington state has one serving the eastern quarter of the state, but it didn't take long to determine that the state legislature has no all-female delegations in that part of the state. (Washington elects both houses of the legislature from the same districts, which makes it easy.)
California is not so easy, because the districts for the two legislative houses and the US House are completely independent of each other. Even with maps and more maps and more maps and more maps, and rosters and rosters and rosters, boundary-drawing could only be approximate.
However, I found that besides my own Sunnyvale-Mountain View region of Santa Clara County, plus possibly a few chunks in east San Jose and Morgan Hill-Gilroy, the federal-state level included substantial chunks of Sonoma (Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, and the whole NW portion of the county), Riverside (Indio to Blythe), Ventura, and San Diego Counties, as well as tiny slivers of Solano (a bit near Dixon, and the Birds Landing region), San Francisco (somewhere in the Excelsior, I think), Alameda (a bit in the Hayward-Castro Valley area), and Los Angeles (bits of South Central LA and Long Beach). Cross-correlating that with supervisoral districts was even trickier, but the other substantial winners appear to be
1) Port Hueneme and part of Oxnard (US House, State Senate, State Assembly, county supervisor)
2) and Lemon Grove (US House, State Senate, State Assembly, county supervisor)
Our Assembly member is termed out this year, and the leading candidates to replace her happen to be men, so this situation may not persist for long, but it caused me to wonder: of where else in the US might this also be true? Ah, a research project in political geography, one of my favorite pastimes.
Well, it'd have to be in California, where one-quarter of each house of the legislature, and over a third of the US House members, are women. Two other states have two women senators, but Maine has no women in the US House, and Washington state has one serving the eastern quarter of the state, but it didn't take long to determine that the state legislature has no all-female delegations in that part of the state. (Washington elects both houses of the legislature from the same districts, which makes it easy.)
California is not so easy, because the districts for the two legislative houses and the US House are completely independent of each other. Even with maps and more maps and more maps and more maps, and rosters and rosters and rosters, boundary-drawing could only be approximate.
However, I found that besides my own Sunnyvale-Mountain View region of Santa Clara County, plus possibly a few chunks in east San Jose and Morgan Hill-Gilroy, the federal-state level included substantial chunks of Sonoma (Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, and the whole NW portion of the county), Riverside (Indio to Blythe), Ventura, and San Diego Counties, as well as tiny slivers of Solano (a bit near Dixon, and the Birds Landing region), San Francisco (somewhere in the Excelsior, I think), Alameda (a bit in the Hayward-Castro Valley area), and Los Angeles (bits of South Central LA and Long Beach). Cross-correlating that with supervisoral districts was even trickier, but the other substantial winners appear to be
1) Port Hueneme and part of Oxnard (US House, State Senate, State Assembly, county supervisor)
2) and Lemon Grove (US House, State Senate, State Assembly, county supervisor)
