Women still find themselves underrepresented in politics on a national level, but their ranks are growing in Vermont.
While women make up about 17 percent of the House of Representatives and the Senate in Washington, the percentage of female representation in Vermont is 38 percent in the House and 36.6 percent in the Senate - among the highest in the nation.
It's a trend that other parts of the country aren't following.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the average share of women in state legislatures across the country in 2011 has dropped to about 24 percent, the first time in 40 years that there has been a decrease. The number of women in Congress this year has also decreased for the first time since the 1970s.
There's still a way to go in the executive branch in Vermont, since we've only had one female governor -Madeleine Kunin - in 220 years. It's not much better among the constitutional officers in the Shumlin administration, with only one woman - newly appointed state treasurer Beth Pearce - holding an executive position.
The good news is that about half of Gov. Peter Shumlin's appointees to his administration are women, including many key members of his inner circle, such as Secretary of Civil and Military Affairs Alex McLean, Special Assistant Susan Bartlett, Chief Legal Counsel Beth Robinson, Labor Secretary Annie Noonan, and Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Deb Markowitz.
In the House, eight of the 14 chairmanships have gone to women, including Rep. Carolyn Partridge, D-Windham, who will chair the Agriculture Committee for the second straight biennium.
In the Senate, women are in charge of six of the 11 committees, including Sen. Jeannette White, D-Windham, who will again chair the Government Operations Committee.
And, for the first time ever, all the legislative committees dealing with taxes and the budget at the Statehouse are chaired by women.
Rep. Janet Ancel, D-Calais, was the first woman to be elected chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. She succeeds Michael Obuchowski, the longtime Bellows Falls representative who stepped down last week to take a post in the Shumlin administration.
Ancel joins the returning team of women who led the so-called “money committees” in the last biennium - Sen. Jane Kitchell, D-Caledonia, Senate Appropriations chair; Rep. Martha Heath, D-Westford, House Appropriations chair; and Sen. Ann Cummings, Senate Finance Committee chair.
As Cummings told VTDigger.org last week, “The fact that no one's noticed [the trio] means we've done a good job.”
Still, it's a good thing to see our state government display more gender balance than our Congress or the White House. It's been a long time in coming, and we can thank former Governor Madeleine Kunin for that.
As a lawmaker in the 1970s, she battled sexism in the House chamber as she rose to chair the Appropriations Committee. As governor from 1985 to 1991, she brought more women into government than any of her predecessors.
Kunin's successes in state government represented the culmination of the long battles and hard work of other women who served in Montpelier before she did.
Consider that it took until 1920, when Edna Beard was elected to the House, for a woman to serve in the Legislature.
Or that it took until 1954, when Consuelo Northrup Bailey was the first elected female lieutenant governor in U.S. history, for a woman to be elected to a constitutional office in Vermont.
Or that only two female Speakers of the House - Bailey in the 1950s and Gaye Symington in the 2000s - have served Vermont in more than 200 years.
Someday, it won't be seen as such a big deal for women and men in equal numbers to serve in government, or for women to hold positions of power and responsibility.
Until the day when the rest of the nation catches up with Vermont, we will savor our status as a state where powerful women are not the exception, but the rule.