This election season, we are witnessing a record number of women running for political office at all levels. It’s amazing and inspiring to watch.
More women in elected office could mean a change in the way politics is done. When women make up 50 percent of our elected officials, I suspect we will see more collaboration and less competition, and more of a focus on issues that are important to the health and well-being of everyone.
As I think about this, I also wonder how many women have considered running or been asked to run but find that they aren’t able to do it. I think about this because I am one of those women.
When my state representative, John Scibak, announced that he did not plan to seek another term, several of my colleagues reached out to encourage me to run. I will confess that I had started thinking about it even before their calls and emails came.
The decision not to run was a very difficult one. I’m committed to public service and have spent most of my adult life working for public and nonprofit agencies. My background and experience make me a good candidate for this position. Not only that, but also it’s a job that I would enjoy and work hard to do well.
What makes me a good candidate? I’ve had a lot of diverse experiences that would inform my perspectives on policy issues. As a young adult, I made my living as a bartender and server — jobs that came without benefits like health insurance, sick time or paid vacations. I’ve never forgotten what it was like to live that close to the edge financially.
Now in my role as president of the board of Community Action, I see the work the agency does to help people in our community who live in poverty have access to the basics, such as food, fuel assistance, child care and more. As a state representative, I would want to make sure that agencies like this could continue to do their good work while also being able to pay their employees a living wage.
I spent time working with chronically mentally ill teens and adults as a direct-care staffer at ServiceNet. This work touched me deeply and influenced my decision to go to graduate school to earn a master’s degree in public administration.
At the time, I planned to return to the mental health care field to work at the policy level, making changes that would help the clients I’d worked with. Instead, I found that I really enjoyed learning about and working on affordable housing and community development. To this day, I still volunteer my time working on these issues as a founding member of the Easthampton Affordable and Fair Housing Partnership.
In 2004, I started working at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and I have been there since. I completed a doctorate in education and currently I serve as the academic dean in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. In this role, I work closely with students who are dealing with circumstances that make it challenging for them to be successful in college.
I’ve talked to students who have to work multiple jobs in order to stay in school (and sometimes because they have to support family members), others who are dealing with chronic health issues, and still others who have experienced the death or illness of a parent while trying to focus on their classes. It’s eye-opening work and I care deeply about all of our students. I see their struggles and recognize how challenging it can be for them to stay in school and take on thousands of dollars in debt to be there.
In addition to my education and work experience, I’m also a mother to two daughters. I want them to see women in elected office and recognize that as a normal thing. I am active in local politics and for the past several years I’ve focused on encouraging women to run for office and worked to help them win.
So, after all of this, why did I decide not to run? Through conversations with my spouse and kids, as well as trusted friends and mentors, I’ve realized what I would have to sacrifice in order to do this job. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not afraid of sacrifice, but I recognized that this was not going to be workable.
The biggest drawback is financial. I’ve worked hard to make it to a professional position that provides me with a salary that allows my husband to work more flexible hours so he can be home for our girls. Serving as state representative would mean taking a substantial cut in pay, which would mean my husband would have to work more and our girls wouldn’t have us around as much.
There is also the travel to consider. State representatives travel to Boston frequently during the week for legislative sessions or committee work. This would mean missing family dinners, kids’ soccer games and practices and spending long hours on the road. These considerations don’t even take into account the stresses of running a campaign while working full time, parenting and helping out with my ailing mother.
The realization that I couldn’t run was so disheartening, and I realized that perhaps I wasn’t the only one experiencing these barriers. While I understand that it’s difficult for men to make the decision to run, I truly think that it is harder for women to make this commitment.
Our society is still set up to allow men more flexibility to pursue positions like this because they typically have a wife at home to take care of their family. It looks good for a man who runs to be a “family man,” but often when a woman who has young children runs, she is portrayed as irresponsible or abandoning their kids (remember Jane Swift?).
Maybe it’s time to rethink the ways that we govern our state. Our 200-plus-year-old state Legislature was set up by white men of means so that white men of means could govern. This system did not take into account the increasing diversity of our communities, changes in women’s roles, or the difficulties of traveling across the state while having other responsibilities.
It seems to me that part of the answer is to elect more women in order to make these changes. Now if we could just make it easier to run and do the job.
Jackie Brousseau-Pereira, of Easthampton, is the academic dean and director of first-year seminars in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a local volunteer and activist.