When Rebecca Noecker first decided to enter politics in 2016, she was a young mother with two kids and many questions. She had a background in education but no knowledge of how to run for office.
“There were so many systems that I saw around me that just felt broken and people were in pain and I wanted to do something about that,” Noecker, 39, said. “And it felt like politics was a way to do it.”
She found a teacher in the only woman on her city council in St Paul, Minnesota.
“She would walk around the lake with her constituents and called them ‘lake laps’. I went on a lake lap with her, and I was just so struck by how authentic and genuine she was,” Noecker said of her mentor, the former council member Amy Brendmoen.
“She had three children and talked a lot about how despite the fact that you make sacrifices and you’re not necessarily home every night, your kids have this remarkable opportunity to see you in leadership and see what a difference you can make.”
Today, Noecker, who represents the second ward, is St Paul’s longest serving member on the council. But she is far from the only woman.
Last fall, all seven city council seats were up for grabs. On 7 November, after a campaign season packed with candidates, Minnesota’s capital city elected its new city council – comprised entirely of women. Last week marked the group’s inauguration.
Noecker’s fellow council members – Nelsie Yang, Cheniqua Johnson, Hwa Jeong Kim, Saura Jost, Anika Bowie and Mitra Jalali – are all women of color and, like her, progressive in their politics. All council members are also under 40.
The diversity of the group is something the newly elected council member Johnson, 28, called “amazing and affirming”.
“When you spend almost a year and a half working to earn your community’s trust during the cycle and vocalizing the community’s priority, you see – as the elections come in – that community heard you, they showed up and essentially, they want you to continue the work with them,” Johnson said. “It means voters elected who they wanted to see represent them. Many candidates ran and yet, our city said, ‘We want an all-woman city council.’”
A 2023 Pew research report on women leaders in US politics found that women’s representation in politics continues to grow across all forms of government including the US Senate, House of Representatives, state legislatures and governors.
In 2019, Nevada became the first state with a majority-female state legislature. Today, women make up 62% of the Nevada state legislature – the largest percentage of any state.
But experts have noted that no major city has achieved the feat of electing an all-female city council like St Paul.
Notably, St Paul has a population of roughly 300,000 people, the second most populous city in the state after its fellow Twin city, Minneapolis. Approximately 46% identify as a race other than white, according to the US census.
Jalali was also re-elected to the council and will now serve as its leader. Elected president in a unanimous vote, she said an all-female city council should be considered normal.
“St Paul voters are showing the world what’s possible on city councils, county boards and local and state government everywhere,” Jalali, 37, said. “This shouldn’t be an exceptional story, but a quiet normal that communities everywhere get to experience.”
Jalali is the first Iranian American to hold office in Minnesota and her résumé includes experience teaching and working for a fellow political pioneer, Keith Ellison, a former US house representative for Minnesota. He was the first Muslim elected to Congress and the first African American representative from the state.
“I’m excited to lead our council forward with our community’s voices at the table,” Jalali said.
Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), said women’s representation in US politics is generally trending upward.
“If you look across levels of office, we’re seeing pretty steady gains,” she told the Guardian. “Although for many years they were incremental, but they were still upward.”
In a CAWP study titled Rethinking Women’s Political Power, 192 political actors were interviewed within five states – Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania – “to examine both the state of and change in women’s political power from 2010 to 2023”.
Several barriers to women’s political representation were discovered: women’s unequal access to monied networks in campaign fundraising, low salaries for public service jobs and political party influence.
“State-level and national mapping of existing organizations and programs shows that the support infrastructures for Democratic women in politics are more robust than those available to Republican women,” the report said. “This is true as well in our case states, where fewer gender-targeted resources are available to Republican women than their Democratic counterparts, even where Republicans hold statewide control.”
While Dittmar pointed out that some of these barriers are easing, she said it’s also important to note that women are still underrepresented across different levels of office. It is uncommon for women to hold at least one third of offices at any level of government.
“In the cases where we do see women make up either a majority, or in this case, all of a governing body, they are still very few and far between,” Dittmar said.
Dittmar also credited, in part, societal changes that have allowed women to have a more noticeable presence in politics.
“Beyond politics, there are [elements] that better situate women to run and win. Those are not only things on an individual level – where women have more access to positions of power across institutions, access to capital, and access to time outside the home due to a shift in expectations of gender roles – but also in the private and public spheres,” Dittmar said.
“You’re seeing shifts in perceptions, both in the importance of having women in office, as well as women’s qualifications – things that historically have been more biased in ways that could really present significant hurdles to women. Voters may be more prone to think about the potential, value and capacity for women to hold political positions.”
• This article was amended on 20 January 2024. Keith Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress and the first African American representative from Minnesota, not Mitra Jalali, as an earlier version said. Also, the population of St Paul is roughly 300,000, not 30,000.
