Democrat Kayla Young and Republican Patricia Rucker frequently clash on abortion rights and just about everything else in West Virginia’s Legislature, but they agree on one thing: Too few of their colleagues are women, and it’s hurting the state.
“There are exceptions to every single rule, but I think in general, men do kind of see this as their field,” said Rucker, part of the GOP’s Senate supermajority that passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans while Young — the lone Democratic woman elected to the House — opposed it.
Nearly 130 years since the first three women were elected to state legislative offices in the U.S., women remain massively underrepresented in state legislatures.
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