Forum Takes a Look at Women in Politics

Although they are seeking different offices--and in one case competing against one another--the leading women candidates for citywide offices in Los Angeles share a sense that they are battling against traditions and habits formed over decades.

“It’s still a very, very male-dominated arena,” Councilwoman Laura Chick, a candidate for city controller in the April 10 municipal primary, told a women’s forum Tuesday night. “It’s adversarial and hostile. . . . We need to change that.”

Chick is one of a few female candidates seeking one of the city’s three top posts this spring--mayor, city attorney and controller.

The other major candidates--state Controller Kathleen Connell, for mayor, and Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino for city attorney--joined Chick in talking about gender and politics to a gathering of about 100 women at the Four Seasons Hotel. Business executive Laurette Healey, Chick’s main competitor for the controller’s job, arrived toward the end of the forum and briefly addressed the same issues.

The gathering was inspired, in part, by a surprising fact of Los Angeles’ political life:

Despite an electorate that is 56% women, Los Angeles has yet to elect a woman to citywide office. While women held a record five of the 15 seats on the City Council for most of the last eight years, they are still clearly in the minority, and their numbers could fall after the upcoming elections.

Women have been elected mayors of big cities across the nation, but they have not reached the political pinnacle in the two largest ones, New York and Los Angeles. The third, Chicago, has not had a female chief executive since Jane Byrne left office in 1983.

“I’m only the third woman state controller in the country,” Connell said. She said she supported all four women who ran--unsuccessfully--for statewide California office in 1998.

Connell is not, however, the only woman to achieve statewide success in California. Indeed, this is one of only three states in the nation with two women representing it in the U.S. Senate. (Maine and Washington state are the others.)

D’Agostino, who is running for city attorney against two better-financed men who are part of the city’s political establishment, said women candidates face a number of challenges. “Raising money,” she said, “is the hardest part of this.”

“Contributors seem to think men are more viable candidates,” D’Agostino said. Money or not, however, she was able to secure the endorsements of every major area and state law enforcement group, as well as the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., she said.

Being a woman candidate has its pluses, which can be carried into the job once the election is won, the candidates told the forum:

“I bring a family orientation to the issues,” Connell said.

“We have incredible experience in terms of building consensus,” Chick said.

Healey, delayed by another campaign activity, arrived in time to tout her experience as a gender pioneer in the business world, including becoming, at the age of 33, one of the youngest female chief executive officers of a publicly held company.

“I’ve picked a few shards of glass out of my hair crashing through glass ceilings,” Healey said.

And Chick said she saw proof of her own political strength when several potential rivals considered running against her for controller but declined. Without referring to Healey by name, Chick said Mayor Richard Riordan, with whom she has often clashed, is “running someone against me, and he’s funding her.”

(Healey has said she approached the mayor, whom she met through her volunteer work with an after-school program, about her interest in running for office but that it was her choice to run for controller. Riordan is helping her raise money.)

The “Women in the Race” forum was sponsored by Tomorrow’s Leaders Today, for women in their 20s and 30s, with help from its parent organization, Women of Los Angeles. The groups organize monthly sessions on a range of topics of interest to women.