April 02, 2024

United States Senator Laphonza Butler, the third Black woman to serve in the Senate and the only Black woman currently serving, will join CAWP as our 2024 Senator Wynona Lipman Chair in Women’s Political Leadership. Her Lipman lecture, The Power of Black Women's Leadership in Politics, will be held on April 24th, 2024 at 7pm ET on the Rutgers University–New Brunswick campus. Prior to her appointment to the Senate in 2023, Senator Butler spent her career championing fairness and justice. For nearly two decades she was an organizer and leader in the labor movement. As president of SEIU local 2015, she helped raise California’s minimum wage and secure paid sick leave for home care workers, and she helped recruit and support more than 600 women candidates for political office during her tenure as president of EMILYs List.

The Lipman Chair was created to honor the legacy of the late state Senator Wynona Lipman, the first African American woman in the New Jersey State Senate. We are grateful to the New Jersey governor, the legislature, and the Lipman Chair advisory committee members for their commitment to honoring Senator Lipman's memory and advancing women's leadership. Learn more about Senator Lipman, this year’s lecture, and the history of venerable Lipman Chair holders at the Senator Wynona Lipman Chair page. Space is limited for this event — register today!

Earlier this month, CAWP launched our new resource tracking campaign finance in this year’s elections, Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024. This project is the first time that CAWP will follow gender and political fundraising throughout a live election cycle. Last week, report authors Kira Sanbonmatsu and Shikshya Adhikari contributed a piece for the CAWP blog in which they laid out the key aspects of the Women, Money, & Politics 2024 project, pointed to the usefulness of this data, and gave some insight about trends CAWP is seeing in the 2024 money race. Some critical themes in fundraising include the role of individual donors, small dollar contributions, and self-financing. We’ll also be paying attention to the donor gap – disparities between men and women as campaign donors – to gauge whether women are exercising their political voice by supporting candidates. Read the full piece: What to Watch: Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024.

CAWP’s flagship Ready to Run® New Jersey program returned last month to the Rutgers University–New Brunswick campus. Over two days of panels and workshops, Ready to Run® 2024 attendees learned the logistics of launching a political campaign, strategies to bring that campaign to voters, and ways to get involved in the politics of their communities and in the Garden State. But it was also an opportunity for women embarking on a political career to hear from powerful women in state politics. New Jersey Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State Tahesha Way told attendees, “We all benefit when there are more women – and different kinds of women – in rooms where decisions are made.” And in our day two keynote panel called Women, Power, and the Future of New Jersey Government, New Jersey Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Ruiz recounted the influence her father had on her early political trajectory: “My father said, ‘I’m tired of watching you knock on doors for other people. I want to see you knock on doors for yourself.'"

Learn more about Ready to Run® New Jersey, or find a program near you in our national network of partner programs, at the Ready to Run® page on the CAWP website.

Following the March 19th primaries in Illinois and Ohio, CAWP tracked election results for women candidates running for office. Here are the key takeaways:

• In both Illinois and Ohio, all women incumbents in the U.S. House races are gearing up for the November elections. Representatives Marcy Kaptur and Emilia Sykes from Ohio face toss-up contests, adding suspense to the upcoming electoral season.

• Unfortunately, Illinois is unlikely to see an expansion in women's representation in its congressional delegation. The two women nominees running as challengers are facing an uphill battle in districts heavily favoring their incumbent opponents.

• U.S. House women nominees from Ohio are all Democrats, with no Republican woman representing Ohio in Congress since 2013.

• No woman has ever served in the U.S. Senate from Ohio, and this trend will continue as no women filed as major-party candidates in the 2024 Senate race in the state.

For full results for women candidates in yesterday's primary contests, check out CAWP’s Election Analysis for March 19th primaries. For full context on women in the 2024 elections, visit CAWP's Election Watch.

We’re thrilled to welcome Amani Mansour to the CAWP communications team as our new public relations specialist. Amani joins us from Sunshine Sachs Morgan & Lylis, a national communications firm, where she executed national public relations campaigns for social impact, nonprofit, and advocacy clients. Prior to that, she served as the communications and district director for Massachusetts State Representative Kay Khan, former chair of the Joint Committee on Children, Families, and Persons with Disabilities. In addition to her work in public relations and communications, Amani is an alumna of both our NEW Leadership® (class of 2013) and Ready to Run® programs. With her passion for women’s political engagement and experience in government, campaign, and agency communications, Amani is a very welcome addition to the team that brings our data, scholarship, and programs to the world.

As we continue to release cutting-edge data and analyses on women in American politics, we are looking for a research operations manager and research associate who are eager to join our mission and team.

The research operations manager will oversee research project coordination and administration, supervise team members' professional development, offer strategic support in research agenda planning, collaborate with key stakeholders, and represent CAWP in research partnerships.

The research associate will support scholars and staff on research projects, including project planning, literature review, data collection, and analysis, while also contributing to research memos and blogs focusing on gender, race, and politics analysis in relation to current events.