Why Does a State Like Pennsylvania Still Have a Glass Ceiling?
BY TOM SULLIVAN
There are few places or industries in America that can still be referred to without irony as a “man’s world.”
Strangely, Pennsylvania politics is still one of them.
Consider the statistics: Pennsylvania has never elected a woman governor or US senator. The state’s 18-member congressional delegation has no women. Our 253-member legislature had one of the lowest percentages of women in the nation and the lowest among northeastern states.
“Harrisburg definitely tends to be a good-old-boy network,” Allison Latch, former female state senator, revealed about why she chose not to run for a second term. “The best way I can put it is that the men in this state are very good at making a woman feel small even when she has a big job. I can accomplish way more in Pennsylvania now that I work in the private sector. There were times I felt like my male counterparts fought me on issues just because I was a woman.”
Ms. Latch added: “Campaigning in this state is brutal. It’s not easy to be an intelligent woman and not go insane over some of the things voters and even politicians will call a woman running for office in this state.”
Now tech executive Charlotte Walsh has moved home to northeastern Pennsylvania to try to break at least one of the glass ceilings here by becoming the state’s first female senator. Incumbent Ted Slaughter has tried to use the fact that Walsh is the mother of three young girls against her in new iterations of his stump speech.
“Will she be running home from Washington every time someone gets a cold? And what does it say that she thinks nothing of abandoning her young children, children who depend on her, for long stretches of time?”
Slaughter’s tactics of painting Walsh as a potentially ineffective legislator due to what he portends is her handicap as a mother and as a bad parent for abandoning her kids has done him no favors with suburban women voters, and Walsh has narrowed the spread between herself and the incumbent by just two points.
Story cont. on page B8