Laramie representative Cathy Connolly speaks to participants of the Elect Her conference Saturday in the Union family room. About 50 participants attended.
Wyoming representative and UW professor Cathy Connolly spoke at Saturday’s Elect Her conference as the event’s keynote speaker.
“I’m an unapologetic progressive feminist and I always have been,” Connolly opened her speech with.
As one of only eight Democrats in the House of Representatives and one of only 15 women, she spoke about her own fears and concerns running for office.
“Every one of your fears is true; so what?” she said.
ASUW and the American Association of University Women sponsored the conference.
Kate Farrar, the director of campus leadership programs for AAUW also was at the conference and gave some insight into why so few women hold elected positions.
“Women actually are the majority but less than 20 percent hold elected positions,” Farrar said. “On average, women also need to be asked to run for office six times more than men.”
Farrar said that some explanations for this include that women are afraid of media scrutiny, do not feel qualified, or they simply do not know how to run.
“When women run, they usually win. They just don’t run to the same extent as men,” Farrar said.
Connolly also went on to explain that she was a stereotype of this fact in the sense that she did not initially decide to run for office, but instead had to be asked.
“There are differences in men and women in terms of political ambition. I’m a stereotype in that regard and I hate being a stereotype. Men tend to have political ambition where they’ll sit back and say ‘you know what, I think I’ll run for city council, or I think I want to run for congressman or president,’” she said. “That is a career trajectory that far more men have than women.”
Connolly was asked to run for state legislature by the former president of the school board when she could not do it herself.
“I was floored, this came out of left field. But I looked at it as it was not about me, but I could serve a constituent,” Connolly said. “It gave me some comfort to think of myself like that.”
Connolly went on to discuss how discouraged she felt when she decided to run for the House of Representatives, saying how the manual she was given that talked about how candidates might reconsider running if they had “skeletons in their closets,” which could include being divorced. and should rely on their families of origin.
“Here I have two big red check marks saying to me ‘don’t run,’” Connolly said. “So we decided to have a committee, which ended up being overwhelmingly women. This is an example of women helping each other.”
Connolly went on to attempt to settle the fears of some of the attendees by telling them it is not necessary to have a thick skin to go into politics and that is only necessary to be willing to stand up for important issues.
“You have to be willing to put yourself out there and hear some really horrific things about issues that you care about and no one expects you take it all in and let it roll off you,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you as an elected official if that was the case.”
In addition to Connolly’s speech, the conference also consisted of a presentation by Dr. Tracey Owen Patton from the Department of Communication and Journalism on the importance of language as well as a panel of female student leaders, which included Maggie Moran, Jordan Kaul, Lauren Robertson and Mariah McKay.
At the end of the day, there was also an election simulation in which all the attendees held a campaign to run for a position and were voted upon.
