The Latest Pressure Group in the Redistricting Battle : Politics: Women are learning that they, too, have a stake in reapportionment--the keys to the political kingdom and more power.

Ethnic minorities may have the numbers and the law behind them when seeking greater political representation, but don’t count women out.

“Reapportionment creates a window of opportunity by creating open seats,” says Ellen Malcolm of EMILY’s List, an organization that raises money for Democratic women candidates. “We’ll have that opportunity in 1992--and then that window will close again for the rest of the decade.” In 1988, 408 House incumbents ran for reelection; 401 held onto their seats. Only two women were first-timers. Two years later, of five women newly elected to Congress, four were elected in open-seat races, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).

To ensure that women have a say in reapportionment, EMILY’s List supported women in key Florida state senate races in 1990. It worked. Gwen Margolis of Dade County was elected president of the state senate, which gave her the right to name the members of the redistricting committee, including the chair of the congressional redistricting subcommittee, a woman. As a result of the 1990 Census, Florida picks up four congressional seats. Coupled with new lines that will be drawn beginning in January, the new seats could mean that Florida will send three or four women to the House.

Redistricting can also have a downside for women. Often women incumbents lose major chunks of their districts or wind up facing other incumbents. For example, in Indiana, Joyce Brinkman, a Republican from Indianapolis, was the ranking minority House member of the committee charged with redrawing the lines. That didn’t save her from being thrown into a district with two other incumbents.

Yet, women can head off such political setbacks. Utah women heard rumors that half the 12 women in the state’s 104-member Legislature would be hurt by various redistricting proposals. A coalition of about 15 organizations--including the Utah Women’s Forum and the YWCA, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus and the American Assn. of University Women--held a news conference to protest the proposed changes.

“In effect, we said, ‘We’re watching you,’ ” recalled Brenda Hancock, women’s forum president. “We’re already worst in the West, don’t make it worse” for women’s representation.

The political map-makers responded: The district of one of two women threatened in the state Senate was saved, and one or more in the House. Only three women officeholders are now at serious political risk.

In California, newly proposed congressional districts could benefit women candidates. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus may run for what could be an open congressional seat in the San Fernando Valley. Her Republican colleague Joan Milke Flores is considering running in a district that includes her political base in San Pedro.

But if the plan drafted by three retired judges--all men--holds up, some women in the Legislature could find themselves in difficult races. Assemblywoman Bev Hansen (R-Santa Rosa) faces a district less hospitable to a Republican. Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco) could lose the most liberal part of her district--70,000 voters whom she has represented since 1986. Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Union City) could see her hometown base move out of her district. The districts of Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress) and two other incumbents overlap in Orange County, so someone will have to leave to avoid a collision at the polls. And to no one’s surprise, the Los Angeles district that sent Democrat Barbara Friedman to the Assembly in a recent special election has been carved up.

More than half the women in the Legislature are Democrats. Can there be any question that they, at least, would have fared better in a plan that the Legislature and a Democratic governor, especially one named Dianne, agreed on?

Yet probably the worst case of the use of redistricting to undercut women officeholders occurred in Illinois. Twenty-five of the 32 women state legislators were dealt bad political hands by a special reapportionment panel after the state’s Republican governor vetoed the plan passed by the Democratic Legislature. Eleven women were put in districts with other incumbents. In two districts, both incumbents are female. The home city of one prominent woman legislator was divided, with 85,000 new constituents from the suburbs and rural farming communities added to her district.

A coalition of women’s groups quickly joined an existing lawsuit. They charged that the redistricting plan violated several provisions of the Illinois constitution, including one forbidding the state from denying equal protection of the law on ground of gender and another requiring free and equal elections. Admittedly, it is an argument that strains accepted legal reasoning. But it is a stretch the women are willing to make. “If you are going to have free and equal elections, you have to have an equal opportunity to win,” says Illinois state Sen. Joyce Holmberg, whose home city of Rockford was divided in the redistricting plan. It is also important because women in the Illinois legislature have shown special concern for issues women care about--sexual assault, pay equity, child support, prenatal services, child care and women’s health.

The women took their novel legal theory to the Illinois Supreme Court. Because women don’t live in any particular geographic concentration, the argument went, the only way they could be discriminated against in redistricting was “to make reelection impossible or difficult for women incumbents.” To prevent this, women must be given “at least as favorable a district as they had before the redistricting,” allowing for population change. On Dec. 13, the court threw out the redistricting plan without ruling on the merits of the women’s legal argument. It ordered the special commission to come up with an alternative.

The women conceded that redistricting should not, as a rule, protect incumbents. “In fact, if women had not been discriminated against,” they said, “they would prefer a maximum number of open districts, which they would then have a chance of winning.”

Women or men in office, who cares?

Viewers of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas know the answer. Fourteen men not only betrayed their indifference to sexual-harassment charges against Thomas; they either ridiculed his accuser, law professor Anita Faye Hill, or performed meekly in defending her because they didn’t know what questions to ask or weren’t exactly pure themselves.

Having women in legislatures does make a difference, and the numbers prove it. A recent survey by the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University showed that there are simply some issues to which most women legislators pay more attention. It found a gender gap on six of eight policy issues, with women consistently more likely to support a feminist or liberal position. The survey also disclosed that 59% of the women lawmakers, whether they identified themselves as feminists or not, worked on some kind of women’s-rights bill during the most recent legislative session; only 36% of the men did.

A lot of women, galvanized to political action by the Thomas hearings, may learn all these facts of redistricting life too late--that reapportionment, too, can be a women’s issue. Their window of opportunity may slam shut just as they are getting motivated.