Women Made Electoral Gains in Statehouses Across the Country in 2024. The Southeast Is a Different Story.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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A few weeks ago, the clerk of the South Carolina Senate called out each of the 46 members’ names, then directed them all to stand and raise their right hands. He needed to swear them in for the new session. Among the supermajority of Republicans, zero women stood.

Voters hadn’t elected a single one to the chamber in November.

Now, after more than a decade, the Senate’s Republican caucus is once again an all-men’s club, one that will make decisions about issues that directly affect women: abortion, in vitro fertilization and Medicaid coverage of lactation specialists, to name a few. November’s election ushered in only two women to serve in the entire chamber, and both are Democrats. Given Republicans control what legislation moves forward, neither will wield much power.

Women aren’t represented much more on the other side of the Statehouse. Female lawmakers make up just 10% of South Carolina House Republicans.

Similar postelection stories are playing out across the Southeast, a region long defined by traditional culture and conservative politics. All but one state that held legislative elections last fall in this region saw losses of Republican women, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and South Carolina. Tennessee was the lone exception — its voters added a single net Republican woman to their legislature.

Most of the region’s legislatures were woefully short of women’s representation even before the election, as ProPublica reported at this time last year. Women constitute fewer than 1 in 5 state legislators across much of the Southeast, where most states consistently rank at the bottom of virtually all measures of women’s health and well-being.

Across the country, 2024 again saw gains for female lawmakers. One-third of state legislators nationwide are women, the most in history. In all of the country’s statehouses — 7,386 legislative seats — women gained 43 seats in November’s elections. Only four were Democrats, although Democratic women still hold almost twice as many seats overall.

But the gains of Republican women weren’t mirrored in the Southeast. The losses weren’t huge, 1 to 3 Republican women per legislature. But with small numbers to begin with, losing just one can make a big difference.

“It has a much more significant effect on the potential for particular voices and lived experiences to be raised in debate and conversation,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor and director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, a key group tracking women’s political participation.

Dittmar didn’t see this trend in other regions. “There’s not one story,” she said, “but rather a lot of unique state-based stories.”

As of the counts the center had finished in mid-December, South Dakota and New Hampshire elected far more new women. Wisconsin lost 6 Republican women and added 11 Democratic women. Connecticut lost 5 Republican women while Democrats held steady. Maine lost 5 Democrats but gained 4 Republicans. In California, women from both parties gained seats.

“We saw a lot of gains around the country for women in legislatures, but the Southeast continues to be a real struggle,” said Sabrina Shulman, chief political officer at Vote Run Lead, which trains women to run for office. Entrenched gender roles still influence voting decisions, she said, and more tradition-minded Republicans — men and women — tend to see men as stronger, more qualified and able to lead.

Dittmar added that President Donald Trump’s campaign emphasized masculinity, which had a trickle-down effect. Republican voters seemed to prefer candidates, including female ones, who were perceived as more masculine or at least not “anti-male,” she said.

Some Republican women who might have considered running also balked at campaigning in the hypermasculine politics of the moment. The Center for American Women and Politics found the number of female candidates for state legislative seats was down across the board — but the largest drop was among Republican women.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans “have largely rejected any attempts at targeted support, recruitment, training and funding of women candidates,” Dittmar said. “Conservatives are still dominantly white and male. The party is made up of people who don’t think it’s a problem” that so few lawmakers are women.

All three Republican incumbent women in South Carolina’s Senate lost their races after they joined with the two other women — one Democrat and one Independent — in the chamber to fight a strict abortion ban. National headlines spotlighted the bipartisan group dubbed the Sister Senators.

Sen. Katrina Shealy was the most senior of the three and the Senate’s only female chair of a standing committee. When she won her first Senate election in 2012, she arrived in Columbia, the state capital, to an all-male Senate. More than a decade later, she leaves it as such again.

Yet, when she was first elected, female leaders had ascended across state politics. Then-Gov. Nikki Haley was a key ally. The state Supreme Court’s chief justice was a woman. Now, the governor is, once again, a man. So is the Senate president. And the House speaker. And the chief justice. The state Supreme Court had no men when it upheld the current abortion law in 2023; it recently added a single female justice.

“I think if men could take the right to vote away from women, they would,” Shealy said. “Just look at South Carolina and what we’ve done. We don’t want women to have a say in anything. That’s obvious.”

At the South Carolina Statehouse, Shealy was widely known as the top legislative champion for children. She blames her loss in the primary on the paltry runoff turnout — but also the fact that Republican women in her home state still often adhere to traditional gender roles.

“Women in the Republican Party always put themselves in the position that we need to support our men,” Shealy said. “They let themselves be subservient to men, especially in the South.”

She wonders how much they realize that men are now exclusively making decisions about issues that specifically affect women, notably reproductive healthcare. South Carolina currently has a six-week abortion ban, but a conservative flank of House members have prefiled a bill that would ban abortions from conception, or basically what Shealy and the other female senators opposed. The bill is sponsored by three women — and 29 men. If it moves to the Senate, not a single Republican debating the restrictions — or voting on them — will be a woman.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.