State representative Tonya Pfaff walks to meet constituents from her district at the statehouse. (Devan Ridgway, WTIU News)
Nationally, Indiana ranks 39th in percentage of women in the state legislature, just behind South Dakota and just ahead of North Dakota. About twenty seven percent of Indiana’s 150 seats are held by women.
One of these women, Representative Tonya Pfaff (D-Terre Haute), has been in the General Assembly since 2018. Initially, she suggested to her husband that he should run for district 43’s open seat, but he thought she should do it.
“That was really the first time I started thinking about running for politics,” Pfaff said.
A high school math teacher, she decided it was time to get involved in the state’s decisions on public education.
"I was like, ‘I guess I could run,’ having no idea what the numbers of women and men were, or how despairing the numbers are. I had really no idea at the time. However, now that I look back at it, my primary was me and four men.”
Pfaff is one of forty women in Indiana’s state legislature. All the adjacent states have higher percentages of women: Illinois has 43 percent, Michigan 40 percent, Kentucky 31 percent, and Ohio 29 percent.
“It affects everything: in the committee, the bills that we hear, all the way to the bills that we vote on,” Pfaff said. “If you look at other states that have more women in legislative bodies, there's more talk about child care, health care, pre-K.”
Women make up just over fifty percent of Indiana’s population. Political science researcher at Notre Dame and fourth year PhD student Emma Schroeder said the disparity in representation affects what bills advance, get carried, and how much interest Hoosier women have in politics.
“We know that women in office are more likely to introduce bills on women's issues, they're more likely to vote for bills on women's issues, they're more likely to give speeches on women's issues,” Schroeder said.
Women as a voting demographic are more favorable to educational and welfare spending, regardless of party, according to Xavier University research. And women legislators are more likely to vote for and carry bills in these areas, along with family issues.
Schroeder added more representation also changes how women discuss these issues with their male counterparts in the legislature and the way policy gets addressed.
Nevada became the first state with a majority woman legislature in 2018. New Mexico has the second-highest number of women representees.
As a policy advocate for United Way of Central Indiana, Ryan Myers spends most of her days at the statehouse during session. While her organization’s goal of ending poverty isn’t gendered, the issue has a disproportionate effect on Hoosier women. Out of Indiana households in 2022, those headed by a single woman had the highest rates of financial hardship, at 75 percent.
Myers said women are more likely to be primary caregivers in their families, for both aging relatives and kids.
“When you think about the gender wage gap that we know still persists in Indiana and across the country, all of those things then tie back into women's economic security, and women facing poverty at higher rates than men,” Myers said. “And so, even though it's not explicitly called out in our mission, gender plays a big role in so many on the issues that we talk about and what we talk to legislators about.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2022, Hoosier women who worked full-time made a little more than 77 percent of the median weekly earnings of men– one of the largest pay gaps in the country. University of Indianapolis research shows state legislatures with more gender parity have narrower pay gaps.
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Angela Carrklitzsch is president of Women4Change. She said during the pandemic, Hoosier women were hit especially hard.
“So, after COVID hit in 2020 in the first three months, 90 percent of the workforce who left was women,” Carrklitzsch said. “We lost 50 years of economic empowerment in that brief period of time, and trying to build that back will take decades.”
The state legislature is showing interest in a childcare tax credit bill and addressing the rape kit backlog this legislative session, which Carrklitzsch said is encouraging.
But she added one quarter of Indiana’s counties are maternal healthcare deserts, and another 28 percent have limited care – issues that are harder to move. And though Indiana passed a near total abortion ban in 2022, bills were still proposed this session to restrict access.
“It doesn't matter if you're a woman or a man if you're coming from a background that has a different ideology,” she said. “But we have found that many women are much more receptive, regardless of where they sit on the aisle, to discussing women's issues.”
Carrklitzsch said women face barriers running for office: time between work and family obligations, and the pay gap means an uphill battle self-financing a campaign.
Read: Hoosier women share how motherhood informs their legislative work
Schroeder said Indiana is one of eighteen states that has never had a woman governor, but voters are favorable to women candidates.
“We don't see much evidence anymore that voters discriminate against women candidates.”
Schroeder added republican women are less likely to run for state office in Indiana. Of Indiana’s 50 senate seats– republican women hold seven and democratic women hold three.
Of 70 house seats held by republicans, 15 are held by women. Of the democrats’ 30 house seats, half are held by women.
Though women experience barriers running for office, Pfaff said it’s important that women run.
“It would be great if somehow we could motivate women to see the importance and value of coming here and having their voices heard.”
Indiana Minority Caucus Leader Senator Shelli Yoder (D-Bloomington) agrees. And she said it’s important to have challenging conversations.
“Whether it's removing the sales tax to menstrual discharge collection devices, or the ‘tampon tax'; I've never shied away from standing up for family leave. I've never shied away from talking about equal pay for equal work.”
Indiana’s representation is up from 2015, when 31 women held a state legislature seat.
Since 1920, when white women got the right to vote, Indiana’s had at least one woman in its legislature. It’s first state representative, Julia Nelson served one term for Delaware County.
During her first year, she sponsored two bills alone. One called for private hearings in certain cases involving rape and the other pertained to determination of paternity.
The Statehouse does not have anything recognizing Nelson as the first woman legislator.
