2016 Postmortem

http://time.com/4594114/she-should-run-women-election/

More Than 4,500 Women Have Signed Up to Run For Office Since the Election
Mahita Gajanan @mahitagajanan Dec. 8, 2016

Through the She Should Run organization

Courtney Peters-Manning decided it was time to run for office immediately after the 2016 election election results came in. Upset by the “incredibly divisive rhetoric” coming from all sides of the political spectrum during the campaign year, Peters-Manning, 39, felt inspired to do more.

“The election was a kick in the pants that I had to step up and be more involved,” she said.

She signed up for an incubator program with She Should Run, an organization that trains women for public leadership roles, becoming one of more than 4,500 women who have decided to run for office through the program since the election. The just-launched incubator is designed to build a community of women interested in entering politics and provide them with the tools to do so, the group’s co-founder and CEO Erin Loos Cutraro said.

Women remain the vast minority in government positions in the U.S., making up only about one-fifth of Congress despite accounting for more than half of the population in the country. Representation is paltry at the state level as well, with the proportion of women in state legislatures at just 24.8% going into 2017, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Cutraro, who was not expecting more than a couple hundred women to kickstart their political careers through the incubator, said mobilizing the thousands of women who joined is a welcome challenge. The incubator will help women “connect the dots between their current leadership skills and what it takes to run for office,” through online courses that help them network and build a personal brand, Cutraro said.