Colorado Has the Most Women Leading Local Governments
Originally published by John Aguilar for Governing
When the city council in Cortez, Colo., seated its first pregnant councilwoman a couple of years ago, the seven-member body scrambled to provide arrangements for mother and baby.
“We set up a room in case we needed to stop the meeting to allow her to pump,” said Rachel Medina, who was appointed mayor of Cortez by her council colleagues in 2022.
The council — made up of three women and four men — had to figure out how many meetings the new mother, Mayor Pro Tem Lydia DeHaven, might miss and what steps should be taken to ensure compliance with the city charter regarding attendance.
“She’s actually building her family while on council,” Medina said of her colleague. “What are our rules around that? How do we deal with that?”
Considerations like these are becoming increasingly commonplace in Colorado, where women have swelled the ranks of local and state government in recent years. This year, the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University placed the state at the top of a national list for the highest share of women serving in municipal government — at 46.1 percent. It limited its analysis to municipalities with a population of 10,000 or more.
Of Denver’s 13 city council members, nine are women. And a couple of years ago, the Federal Heights City Council marked a Colorado-first distinction: the first all-woman city council.
The Rutgers report also ranked Colorado No. 2 for the proportion of women serving in the state legislature, representing 49 percent of all House and Senate members under the Gold Dome. The state trailed only Nevada, where the legislature is just over 60 percent women. At the bottom is West Virginia, with fewer than 12 percent of state lawmakers women.
Nationally, women in state legislatures in 2024 hit a high of 32.9 percent — still less than a third of all lawmakers in the country.
“Colorado is ahead of the pack — it’s pretty close to parity,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics. “It’s a pretty good representation.”
Certainly better than 44 years ago, when Wilma Webb was first elected to represent a state House district in the heart of Denver. Webb, who is married to former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, was one of 19 women in the Colorado House in her first term.
There were 36 women in the House in the 2024 legislative session, constituting the majority of the 65-member body.
“We’ve come a long way from where we began,” said Webb, 81, who was just the second African-American woman elected to the Colorado General Assembly. “I know people respect women more now than they once did.”