Training puts women in power

DURHAM -- More than half the world's population may be female, but only 10 percent of elected officials are.

In the United States over the past decade, the percentage of women in state legislatures declined from 28 percent to 22 percent.

In the late 1970s, 17 members of the U.S. House of Representatives out of 435 were women, while today that number is 84. At that rate, it's going to take years to get to parity.

The Pipeline Project is designed to change that.

Duke University and the International Women's Democracy Center will present The Pipeline Project Workshop next month at the university, focusing on helping women gain the tools and technical skills necessary to participate in politics, public policy and leadership positions within their communities.

"What we do is train women in how to get engaged in an electoral campaign, how to make the decision to run and then how to go about doing it," said Barbara Ferris, president of the center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit advocacy group.

The two-day event, open to any member of the community, "walks women through the whole process, registering for office, setting up a campaign team, getting your message out there, raising money, everything you need to know about running for office," said Martha Reeves, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is helping organize the workshop.

The democracy center has been working with Duke on a multiyear project to conduct annual workshops and also to train a team of women to teach others, so they can hold workshops around the state.

The workshops began about six years ago after several young women came to Ferris, who had been Women in Development Director for the Peace Corps for five years, and talked about setting up these kinds of training sessions. Women's voices were actually declining in public policy, and that was cause for concern, she said.

"But I thought, 'Everybody's doing this,'" Ferris recalled. "But everybody's not. I thought the Democrats and the Republicans were training the next generation of women, but they weren't doing any training."

Men didn't need the boost.

"Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, does a guy ever go for training to get involved in the political process," Ferris said. "There was a network out there for them, but women are left out of the process."

The workshops, which have been given across the country and in a number of foreign countries, appear to have been successful.

From a Philadelphia event in 2006 that drew 26 women, seven ran for office and three of them won. In Dallas, 10 percent of the women who attended a workshop decided to run for office.

Most of the workshops have been held on college campuses, where "there's so much energy," Ferris said. "The next generation of leaders is really ready to raise their voice."

While college students are encouraged to attend, organizers say any woman with an interest should come.

"Women have the ability to shape policy, but they may be put off for running for office, thinking it's too grueling or too complicated," Reeves said. "This is a way for them to find out they can do it."