Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego faced many challenges when deciding whether to run for office, including her gender.

Prior to being elected in 2019, the now first-term mayor had just given birth and recently gone through a divorce. She also resigned from her previous position on the city council to focus on campaigning, thereby losing her paycheck, Gallego explained during a panel discussion at the SXSW conference last week in Austin, Texas.

Gallego considered research she had seen finding that women are more trusted in areas like healthcare and education, but less trusted in areas like public safety and economic development. She thought about the harsh response to other women who gave birth in office or on the campaign trail. She pointed to former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift who was criticized as a parent for her daycare decisions, and other choices as her young family grew on the campaign trail and in office. And she took into account that many of the country's other largest cities such as Los Angeles and New York City had never elected a woman as mayor.

“All of that made me very nervous and it took me a very long time to decide whether to take the jump and run,” Gallego said.

Ultimately, Gallego said she considered her support and the fact that she would regret not running for the rest of her life. "I’m glad I decided to go for it,” she said.

Gallego's fears were warranted, said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. Sexism on the campaign trail and in the office is "pretty universal" for women in the U.S. "We hear the same stories over and over again," she said, during an interview.

When elected, women often bring their own life experiences with them, allowing them to bring unrecognized issues to the table, Sinzdak said. They are also more likely to bring underrepresented and marginalized groups into the policy-making process, she added.

But women remain largely underrepresented in elected offices throughout the political spectrum. At the local level, women hold less than one-third of elected legislative seats in cities and towns with populations over 10,000, an April 2021 analysis by CAWP found. Among mayors in cities with populations over 30,000, approximately 25% were women, according to May 2021 CAWP research. And among mayors in the top 100 most populated cities, 31 are women.

Read the full article about female mayors discussing sexism by Danielle McLean at Smart Cities Dive.