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COLUMBUS, Ohio — Jo Ann Davidson made Ohio history in 1995 when she became the first woman to become the speaker of the Ohio House, one of the most powerful positions in state government.
And at the time, Ohio was a relative leader in closing the gender gap. Women filled about a quarter of state legislative seats, 15th-best in the country, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
In the three decades since Davidson became speaker, though, Ohio has fallen behind. Women make up a bigger portion of the Ohio General assembly today. But other states have made bigger strides in closing the gender gap. Ohio now ranks 37th nationally.
As Women’s History Month concludes, cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer is highlighting the gender divide in Ohio politics while featuring women who hold leadership positions or other prominent places in state politics this year.
About 30% of Ohio’s state and federal elected officials are women, below the national average of around one-third. But none of Ohio’s executive row offices are held by women, and a woman has never been elected governor or nominated as a major U.S. Senate candidate.
“It doesn’t look the same as other states, including some that are more conservative than Ohio,” said Emily Quick Schriver, CEO of Matriots, a political group founded in 2018 that works to get women elected to local and state office in Ohio.
It’s not exactly clear why women are underrepresented in Ohio politics. Both major parties have had women leaders in recent years, including current Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters. But recent political dominance of Ohio Republicans could be a factor.
There is a partisan divide when it comes to gender makeup in Ohio. Women make up 47% of Ohio’s federal and state positions held by Democrats, compared with just 20% of elected Republicans. That dynamic is true nationwide, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics. She said Republicans haven’t made a targeted effort to promote women like Democrats have in recent years.
“When you talk to Republicans, they are less likely to define women’s underrepresentation as a problem in need of a solution,” Dittmar said. “And what we know in doing this work for 50 years is that if you are unwilling to engage in targeted solutions to address historical inequality, it’s going to take you longer to get to equality.”
That doesn’t mean some Ohio Republicans haven’t tried to close the gender gap.
In January 2017, Jane Timken made Ohio political history when she was elected chair of the Ohio Republican Party. The first woman to lead a major party, Timken made recruiting women candidates a focus.
Since then, women now hold nine more seats in the General Assembly, and all are Republicans. But no women have been elected to statewide executive office, and no Republican women have been elected federally, including Timken, who finished fourth in the GOP primary when she ran in 2022.
“My hope is that it grows,” said Timken, who recently was elected to the Ohio Republican Party’s state central committee. “But women have to be willing to run.”
Generally, the gender gap exists in politics due to a variety of factors.
Dittmar of Syracuse University said these range from the relatively recent historical developments that allowed women to be involved in politics and the tendency of voters to value traits, like toughness and independence, stereotypically associated with men. Women also face economic barriers, making less money while handling a disproportionate share of family responsibilities, and lack dedicated donor networks to counter those that historically have advanced male candidates.
Several women in Ohio politics said women are more likely to question whether they’re qualified, rather than assume they are.
“Most women have to be asked to run for office,” said Stephanie Kunze, a Republican state senator from suburban Columbus.
The lack of women political leaders is associated with a lack of focus on issues that affect women and families, Dittmar said, like childcare, sexual violence and reproductive issues. And when women voters and other marginalized don’t feel represented, they are more likely to be apathetic.
“This is more anecdotal, but seeing people like you in office can change your perception of what’s possible,” Dittmar said.
Here is what some women who hold leadership positions or otherwise or an otherwise prominent place in state politics this year had to say on the topic.
State Sen. Theresa Gavarone, Ohio Senate majority whip (fourth-ranking leadership position)
Gavarone first got into politics in 2013, when she ran for a vacant position on Bowling Green’s city council after someone urged her to do so. At the time, she was an attorney and co-owned a restaurant with her husband.
She won and served there until she was appointed to the Ohio House in 2016. In 2019, she was appointed to the state Senate. Since then, she has taken on an increasingly prominent role, and serves in a leadership position in the GOP Senate caucus, holding the fourth-ranking position.
Today, Gavarone, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022, is viewed as a likely candidate for statewide office in 2026, having been linked to a potential run for Secretary of State.
But Gavraone said she never thought about getting involved with politics until someone suggested it. She may not have considered it earlier in her life, because she said she was balancing raising her children with her day job as an attorney.
But, she said the suggestion planted a seed, and she felt her background and skills gave her something to contribute.
“I don’t know if women need to be urged, but it was something I don’t know I ever would have thought of on my own,” Gavarone said.
State Rep. Allison Russo, Ohio House minority leader
Russo, of Upper Arlington, began her political career in 2018 as one of six Democratic women to join the chamber. Three years later, she became the top Ohio House Democrat.
Before running for office, she worked as a healthcare policy analyst, holding a doctorate in health policy and a master’s degree in public health epidemiology.
Russo said she grew more interested in politics following Donald Trump’s election as president, and then grew more alarmed when national Republicans tried and failed to repeal Obamacare.
She decided to run for the Statehouse at the urging of others. But first, she ran through the mental checklist she said many women candidates consider.
“I had absolutely no political experience other than running a levy campaign,” Russo said. “So I think women go through thinking, do we check all these boxes? And I’m not sure that men necessarily do that.”
Russo gained wider attention after a hard-fought but losing campaign for Congress in 2021. Now, she is near the top of the list of potential future statewide candidate for Ohio Democrats, and could appear on a statewide ballot as soon as 2026, when she is barred by term limits from running for reelection.
“I think again there’s a lot on the line in 2024,” Russo said.
Maureen O’Connor, retired Ohio Supreme Court chief justice
O’Connor, a former lieutenant governor who was the first woman to serve as chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, officially retired from politics last year due to judicial age limits.
But she’s playing a leading role in one of the biggest campaigns of this year – a redistricting reform amendment that’s likely to appear on the November ballot.
O’Connor got involved with the redistricting campaign just days after retiring from the court, where she spent her final two years sparring with fellow Republicans over maps the court said violated anti-gerrymandering reforms. The campaign aims to replace the politician-run Ohio Redistricting Commission with a citizen’s panel.
“I have been very fortunate to have done some really important things in my career, with the help of fabulous staff, very bright people who joined forces,” O’Connor said. “What I’m doing now with Citizens not Politicians, this constitutional amendment for November of 2024, is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my career.”
O’Connor also is advising the government of Ukraine, through a program supported by the European Union and USAID, on how to vet candidates for its high court to help promote public trust and meet conditions for potential future membership in NATO.
After her election as a commons pleas judge and then prosecutor in Summit County, O’Connor ran statewide in 1998 as Gov. Bob Taft’s running mate.
At the time, O’Connor said party leaders saw women as potentially offering an electoral advantage and focused on finding and grooming women leaders for political office.
“I don’t think they pay attention anymore,” she said of current party leadership. “It’s not a priority.”
But O’Connor said while she believes that women face more barriers to enter politics, she never felt disadvantaged herself. She said she lost her first run for elected office – a race for Wadsworth Municipal Judge against an incumbent with an immaculate ballot name – John Judge.
“I was willing to run some races and lose and, and knowing full well, you know, I guess it was playing the long game,” O’Connor said.
Nickie Antonio, minority leader, Ohio Senate
Antonio is a longtime fixture in Cleveland politics, first elected to Lakewood City Council, in 2005. She was then elected to the Ohio House in 2010 —, making her the first openly gay person to win a state legislative seat, and then to the Ohio Senate in 2018. She became minority leader in 2023.
A former special-education teacher and nonprofit executive, Antonio said she got the idea to run after she was frustrated by her attempts to convince city council to build a skate park. She also was motivated by the passage of a ballot issue the year before that banned same-sex marriage in Ohio.
“I had kids watching, and I wasn’t going to have somebody say that everyone who’s lesbian or gay is a second-class citizen,” Antonio said. “Not without a fight.
She said she learned about gender inequality at a young age, after she saw her divorced mother unable to buy a house without her brother co-signing. She also had role models when she got interested in politics, including a close friend, Madeline Cain, whom she helped elect as Lakewood mayor.
While circumstances have improved for women, she said many local political gatekeepers are men who have constantly discouraged her or female candidates she supports from running.
“Women, if they can be so self-empowered to throw themselves into politics, there is definitely an opportunity for them to be taken seriously and to win,” Antonio said. “But there’s still a very strong boy’s club. It’s almost like a gauntlet they have to run through in order to succeed.”
State Rep. Sharon Ray, assistant majority whip (6th-ranking leadership position)
Ray, who has a long career in Medina County politics, is a former Medina County commissioner who was a bailiff with the Wadsworth Municipal Court when she was elected to the Statehouse in 2020. She joined House Speaker Jason Stephens’ leadership team in January 2023, shortly after Stephens became speaker following a contentious leadership vote, even though Ray had voted for a different candidate.
She got involved in politics in 1991, when she was elected to Barberton City Council. She was a 29-year-old divorced mother, inspired, she said, by former President Ronald Reagan. She said other council members were kind to her and nurtured her politically.
‘I had a good experience and had I not had a good experience I probably would have never done it again,” Ray said. “The current political environment is very difficult.”
Ray, who won a heated primary election last week, said family responsibilities and the “rough and tumble” environment of current politics can dissuade women from running for office.
But she hasn’t ever felt like she was excluded because of her gender.
“It’s probably because I’m not a shrinking violet and never let them forget I was in the room,” Ray said.
Emilia Sykes, U.S. representative, Ohio District 13
Ohio Democrats frequently mention Sykes among the most talented politicians in the state. She first ran for office in 2013, filling an Ohio House seat in Akron that either her father, Vernon, or her mother, Barbara, had held for 40 years.
Her colleagues picked her as House minority leader in 2019, a position she held until she ran for Congress in 2021. She won by 5 percentage points in a district drawn to be a political toss-up. She’s running for reelection this year in what’s expected to be one of the state’s closest congressional races.
Sykes said she had resolved to not enter politics after seeing her mother questioned repeatedly about balancing her role as a mother and as an elected officeholder.
But Sykes said she changed her mind after her father asked her to consider running for his seat and after she said she was unimpressed by the other candidates.
After she won, she said she pursued a leadership position because she offered a perspective as a young woman that the legislature lacked.
But Sykes, who is Black, has said over the years that people haven’t taken her seriously at times due to a combination of her race, age and gender. That’s true in Congress, she said, where she said she’s had meetings in which people assume she’s a staff member.
“It is mind boggling,” Sykes said.
Sykes said woman politicians often are more heavily scrutinized about their personal life, and can be typecast into being associated with only certain issues. She also said they face greater personal safety concerns, and are subject to more intense and vitriolic criticism than men.
“And so I just truly applaud all the women who decide they’re not going to listen to the naysayers, the folks who have said we can’t do it, and have persevered over the years,” Sykes said.
Andrew Tobias covers state politics and government for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer
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