![]() ![]() The numbers of women filling legislative seats across the U.S. "It's absolutely wild to know that more than 50 percent of the population of West Virginia are women, and sometimes I'm the only woman that's on a committee, period," said Young, currently the only woman on the House Artificial Intelligence Committee and was one of just two on the House Judiciary Committee when it greenlighted the state's near total abortion ban. Similar low numbers can be found in the nearby southern states of Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. That's compared with Nevada, where women occupy just over 60% of state legislative seats. West Virginia is at the very bottom of that list, having just 16 women in its 134-member Legislature, or just under 12 per cent. ![]() In 10 states, women make up less than 25 per cent of their state legislatures, according to Rutgers' Center for American Women in Politics. 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. "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. 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. ![]()
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