Hi there everyone. I am thrilled to be guest-blogging this month, and hope to focus mostly on women’s issues while I’m here. Since I have a tendency to be long-winded when it comes to these matters, I am just going to jump right in…

Since Palin-palooza first took hold three weeks back, I have been thinking a lot about how this country desperately needs more female candidates at every level. In part, so that a woman running for office is not an anomaly; so that as a nation we stop treating female candidates as if they were interchangeable, like Barbie dolls whose heads you can snap off of one torso and right onto another. (As a feminist, I never thought I’d see the day when Republicans resistant to equal pay for equal work would pander to women voters by referring to the glass ceiling, but that’s another post entirely.)

It seems to me that each election season brings with it a handful of smart, ambitious male candidates in their twenties and early thirties: Last week, in my home district in Brooklyn, 28-year-old Daniel Squadron beat a 30-year-veteran of the New York State Senate. Squadron’s victory and others like it are exciting and admirable, but they make me curious: Where are all the young women?

A 2004 report on young elected leaders conducted by the Eagleton Institute of Politics, found that only 12% of state legislators under 35 were women; that all six members of Congress under 35 were male; that no woman age 35 or younger held a statewide elective executive position; and that among young mayors in municipalities with populations of 30,000 and over, only 16% were women.

This is troubling stuff. Entering into the political arena at a later age denies women access to the pipeline, and precious years of experience that their male counterparts have. (Half of the men in Congress got their start in politics when they were under 35, while the vast majority of women in Congress started after 35.) So why don’t young women enter into politics at the same rate as young men?

Experts cite three main reasons: Because many young women have small children and the onus is still on them to run the household, plus hold a day job on top of political pursuits; because, in most cases, young women need to be encouraged to run for office, while young men simply go for it; and because women feel like they need to know everything before they get there, while men feel they’ll learn on the job. (A highly unscientific poll of my female friends bears out this last point—the young women I know want to know more before they’d ever dream of running for office, and maybe that impulse makes sense. But if the best political opportunities come to those who start early, maybe we need to change the way we think.)

The good news is that several amazing organizations are on the case. This weekend the national nonpartisan group The White House Project is bringing its Go Run political training program to New York. The three-day session prepares women to run for office at all levels through a series of workshops and lectures led by (among others) U.S. Representative Yvette Clark, New York State Senator Liz Krueger, and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Since 2005, over 2,000 women have attended Go Run trainings across the country. 41% of participants are women of color; 46% earn less than $35,000 a year; and 50% are under the age of 30.

In 2002, Emerge, a political leadership training program for Democratic women was founded in San Francisco. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara Boxer, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee are all on the Emerge Advisory Board. In Boston, The Barbara Lee Family Foundation’s Women in Politics Program promotes young women’s participation at all levels of government through events, funding, and a series of guidebooks called Positioning Women to Win. And Emily’s List trains women through the Political Opportunity Program.

But what more should we be doing? Some depressing stats from The Center For American Women and Politics reveal what happens when we don’t invest in young women’s political futures:

• Women hold just 16.3%, of the 535 seats in the 110th US Congress.
• Women hold 24.4% of statewide elective executive offices across the country.
• 23.5%, of state legislators in the United States are women.
• Women hold 21.5% of state senate seats and 24.2%, of state house seats.

In their conclusion, the authors of the Eagleton report wrote: “A thumbnail sketch of today’s young elected officials augurs that a sizeable portion of tomorrow’s top leaders will be male, Caucasian, Christian…this picture of the future is strikingly similar to the familiar one from past generations.”

Here’s hoping we can change that, and soon.