LINCOLN, Neb. – When Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen called a recent special legislative session to address soaring property taxes, it was women who largely stepped up to both advance parts of his main bill and to block his unpopular plans to raise sales and excises taxes to pay for it.
Women hold little more than a third of legislative seats in Nebraska, but they commanded the floor most days of the special session. Those who advocate for getting more women into political office say it is a sight they hope to see replicated across the country as hot-button issues such as abortion, family budgets and school curriculum and safety drive more women to consider running for office.
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Republican Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Omaha, chair of the Revenue Committee, introduced Pillen’s main property tax relief plan. But had she not sought to lead the powerful committee six years earlier, she might have been left to participate from the sidelines.
She initially resisted running for the post, she said, because she had served only two years and had not previously held a seat on the Revenue Committee. It was U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer –- a former state lawmaker –- who encouraged her to take the chance, noting she had been elected chair of the Transportation Committee years earlier without much experience.
“You still go into rooms where you’re the only woman there. Pretty frequently, actually,” Linehan said.
Women historically have been more reluctant than men to seek political office, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. That is still the case, she said, but states have seen a significant increase in women seeking and being elected to office in the past five to six years. Since 2018, the number of women serving in state legislatures has risen from 1,875 to 2,426 earlier this year, a nearly 30% jump, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
The trepidation of women to seek office has often been characterized as a lack of confidence. While that may have been true in generations past, the more likely reason now is that women are relying on what researchers call “relationally embedded decision making," Dittmar said.
“Women have been much more likely to tell us they were considering how a bid for office would affect their kids and their spouses and how it might take time away from those other responsibilities of which women still have the disproportionate burden of,” Dittmar said.
Women are also more likely to consider the effects of sexist and sexual harassment and abuse that come with the job, whether that be online or even from male colleagues, she said.
“Women are asking themselves, ‘Is that worth what I can get done in office?’ ” Dittmar said.
Several women within the Nebraska Legislature are all too familiar with that harassment. Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh, a Democrat from Omaha, was stunned earlier this year when a male colleague invoked her name while reading a graphic account of rape on the floor of the Legislature. Republican Sen. Steve Halloran was found by an investigator to have violated the body’s workforce sexual harassment policy. But the finding led only to the Legislature's male-dominated governing board issuing Halloran a letter of reprimand — a move that carried no punitive measures.
Republican Sen. Julie Slama has, like many of her female colleagues, endured an onslaught of misogynistic social media comments — including threats of sexual violence — in the five years she has served. She was also the target of a male colleague's sexist remarks when then-Sen. Ernie Chambers, a Democrat, implied she was appointed to her seat in 2019 in exchange for sexual favors. She was 23 at the time.
Slama, one of the most conservative lawmakers in Nebraska, often argued alongside Cavanaugh and several left-leaning women in the body during the special session to help block the governor's plan to raise sales and excise taxes, saying it amounted to a tax increase that would hurt working families.
“It is just so critical to have women in these debates because it represents a different perspective in Nebraska that hasn’t always been represented," Slama said.
Cavanaugh hopes to welcome more women to the Nebraska Legislature next year, but she acknowledged she has found it hard to convince women she knows to seek office.
“They say that when men decide to run for office, they just look in the mirror and decide to run, and a woman has to be asked something like five or six times before she’ll even consider it,” Cavanagh said. “I think oftentimes men are dismissive of our abilities, but the fact that we all can stand together, even when we’re fighting with each other, I think is what’s lending us a lot of strength in leading right now.”
By the end of the monthlong special session, the Legislature had passed only a fraction of the 50% cut to property taxes Pillen had sought. A pared-down cap on local governments’ ability to raise property tax levies remained from Linehan’s original proposal. Folded in was a measure by Sen. Jen Day, a Democrat, to front-load an existing property tax credit so that it is automatically deducted from property owners’ tax bills.
Other women in the chamber plan to push ahead during the regular session next year with their ideas for lowering property taxes. That includes a proposal by Sen. Danielle Conrad, a Democrat from Lincoln, to assess additional taxes on households that bring in more than $1 million in annual income. Another by Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha would model California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 voter-approved law that caps property tax increases.
“Budget and tax might sound dry, but it’s absolutely bread and butter issues. It’s absolutely kitchen-table economics," Conrad said.
With women holding 18 of 49 legislative seats, Nebraska ranks 19th among states for the number of women lawmakers.
Republican efforts to target diversity and inclusion programs may be making it harder for women -– even conservative women in GOP-dominated states –- to make gains in government, said Meredith Martino, executive director of Washington-based advocacy group Women in Government. Earlier this year, the Republican-led Iowa Legislature repealed an explicit requirement that the state's decision-making bodies be balanced by gender. In South Carolina, the only three Republican women in the state Senate lost their primary elections this year.
Figures by the Center for American Women and Politics show that among women state lawmakers across the country, Democrats outnumber Republican nearly 2 to 1.
“Republicans control roughly two-thirds of the legislatures in this country,” Martino said. “Are the voices of women being included in the groups that hold the power and are making the decisions?”
Five women in the Nebraska Legislature, including Linehan, will not return next year because of term limits. Slama, a new mother, announced she would retire at the end of this year. It is impossible to know whether women will lose or gain seats in the November election, but a dozen legislative races have at least one woman candidate.