The problem of minority rule in the United States goes well beyond the lopsided makeup of the Senate or partisan gerrymandering. It also extends to who is, and isn’t, able to run and serve in the first place.
Take the disproportionately low number of women in elected office. Women are just over half of the U.S. population, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at our country’s lawmaking bodies. In 2023, fewer than a third of the people serving in the 118th Congress are women — and that’s a record number.
While the makeup of the U.S. Congress is important, state legislatures both introduce far more laws than the national body and pass a larger proportion of the laws they consider. The states are also on the front lines of struggles for everything from voting to abortion rights. And while women have slightly better representation in state houses than in Congress, at nearly 34% of state house seats and a hair over 30% of state senate seats overall, those figures represent the national average. In 2023, in eight states, just 20% or less of the legislative seats are held by women. In the entire country, women are either at parity or in the majority of only two state legislative bodies: Colorado and Nevada.
Launched in 2020, the ultimate goal of the Ascend Fund is nothing less than state legislative gender parity. And despite notable examples of women legislators who hold extreme views on issues including voting rights and abortion rights, the Ascend Fund’s organizers believe that gender parity itself may lead to more legislative compromise, and therefore, to at least more moderate outcomes.
When we first covered Ascend in 2020, the funder had just completed its first phase of learning and exploring the issues, and was starting on what it calls Phase 2 — building its initial portfolio of nonprofit grantees that are working to elect women. Initial seed funding had come from Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, and the fund had granted $2.3 million, the majority of it in single-year grants. Last year, the fund completed its proposed Phase 3, during which it focused funding on three states to test recruitment and retention strategies: Michigan, where women hold 40.5% of the legislative seats; Washington, which stands at 46.3%; and Mississippi, where just under 15% of the seats are held by women. During that phase, the organization also started extending the terms of its grants and now all of its grants run from two to three years.
Ascend isn’t currently accepting new applications, but Hodgson said the funder is currently finalizing renewals with some of its major donors and expects to resume grantmaking in the spring of this year.
From its inception through 2022, the fund has raised $10 million and granted just under $7 million. The Ascend Fund is a project of Panorama Global, which itself was originally founded by former Gates Foundation Director of Global Program Advocacy Gabrielle Fitzgerald. Pivotal is still Ascend’s largest donor to date, but Hodgson said that her organization has also received funding from a variety of individuals, foundations and corporations, with well over 90% of the funding coming from philanthropic vehicles like DAFs and family foundations. Less than 1% of funding is currently derived from corporations and small-dollar donors.
The fund doesn’t support individual campaigns or make grants to campaign-related activities; instead, it moves money to organizations doing the more general work of recruiting and training potential candidates, including breaking down the practical and perceived barriers that stand between women and elected office. Collaboration is also a main focus of Ascend’s work. Rather than working in their individual silos, the organization holds convenings and establishes working groups of its grantees so they can learn from one another.
Ascend Director Abbie Hodgson said that fundraising has been the organization’s biggest challenge. “Our national partners could program an additional $10 million tomorrow, if it were available,” she said,” and noted that the fund projects that it would need a budget of $100 million to operate effectively in all 50 states, which is one of its eventual goals.
The collaborative nature of Ascend’s work may be one of the reasons that fundraising is such a challenge. “There’s a lot of talk in philanthropy about how great [collaboration] is as a model. And yet, there isn’t the level of investment,” she said. “People still prefer to invest directly in organizations, or, I think in our situation, they want to invest in the candidate. So they don’t want to do this real pipeline development work. They just want good candidates in office now.” Which, of course, raises the question of what happens after those individual good candidates move on to other things.
Three states, three sets of unique challenges and opportunities
At first glance, the three states Ascend chose to focus on for Phase 3 might seem counterintuitive, given that two of them are near legislative parity and one, Mississippi, has such a long way to go. According to Hodges, though, all three offered specific challenges and learning opportunities. Washington state, she said, has stood in the 40-ish percent range for decades, “but they just haven’t been able to push over the finish line” into parity. Michigan, she said, feels like it’s on the right trajectory after victories for women in 2018 and 2022. Mississippi, on the other hand, was chosen because “we wanted to also work in a state where there was a lot of progress to be made to demonstrate that we shouldn’t write off swaths of the country as being unable to achieve gender parity.”
Each of the first three target states also has other features that the team at the Ascend Fund felt could either positively or negatively affect women’s ability to be elected. According to Hodgson, research indicates that jungle primaries, like the one in Washington, have benefited women candidates historically. Michigan’s legislative term limits make it critical to build a pipeline of candidates who are trained and prepared to replace elected officials who are term-limited out. Mississippi doesn’t have campaign finance limits, and given the issues that women candidates tend to face in raising money, “we thought that was an important element to explore,” she said.
The Ascend Fund currently has two national grantee partners, New American Leaders and VoteRunLead, each of which has received a three-year, $500,000 annual grant. Other national partners have received an average of $100,000 a year, and state partners have received an average of $25,000 a year. The fund has moved $200,000 to each of its target states to date and has also provided infrastructure support to its state partners.
A bipartisan focus and hope for moderation
Given that its parent organization is a 501(c)(3), the Ascend Fund is nonpartisan. It also doesn’t have a litmus test for funding when it comes to specific issues like abortion. The fund does draw the line, however, at supporting organizations with messages or board members promoting election denial. “We are incredibly cognizant of wanting to elect leaders — and that’s men and women — that are supporters of our democratic institutions and processes, and ensuring they align with us on those values,” Hodgson said.
The Ascend Fund’s neutral stance on the majority of today’s issues and the heavy representation of corporate representatives in its Leadership Circle may be a potential cause for concern for those on the more progressive side of the political spectrum. A look at the funder’s prospectus and the majority of the groups it currently supports, on the other hand, seems to speak to an organization with concerns about equity that go well beyond a person’s biological sex.
The group’s prospectus states, “We believe in the advancement and representation of women and all marginalized genders, including but not limited to transgender, intersex, Two Spirit and non-binary people. The Ascend Fund, and our partners, strive to make sure that gender equity is intersectional and inclusive of all people who have historically been oppressed.”
In terms of its current grantee partners, one of the Ascend Fund’s national partners, New American Leaders, supports candidates that are first- and second-generation Americans. The other, VoteRunLead, notes that 60% of the women it has trained are women of color and 20% come from rural states. Other grantee partners include organizations dedicated to boosting elected representation among mothers, Indigenous women, AAPI women, and Black, Latinx and LGBTQ women. Only two grantees so far, She Holds The Key and Women’s Public Leadership Network, are focused specifically on “center- and right-leaning women.”
In addition to increasing the proportion of elected officials who hold multiple underrepresented identities, the fund has a focus on addressing the economic issues that make it more difficult for women to run and serve, which could also potentially increase the number of representatives from the working and middle classes — in other words, people who have lived experience of the impact of legislation they’re debating.
Progressives and even moderates may fret over the fund’s openness to more conservative candidates. But Hodgson, who herself is a former Kansas Democratic House staffer, said that she has personally seen “the power of women working across the aisle with other women.” She also told IP that she has been tracking the number of Republican women serving in state houses over time, and that now, Republican women are “super minorities” in several Republican state caucuses. In Hodgson’s view, “if there are not women on the Republican side, that reduces bipartisan cooperation. I think it reduces compromise.”
Given the notoriety of famously extreme Republican women serving at the state and national levels, that may sound like wishful thinking. But one thing is certain — there’s no way to know what gender parity will bring until after it has been achieved. And despite how we may feel about the politics of some women running for office, the fact remains that it’s long past time for our elected representatives to reflect the public they serve.