Founded by Melinda French Gates, Pivotal Ventures accelerates social progress by removing barriers that hold people back.
©$year Pivotal Ventures, A Melinda French Gates Company
We’re working to break down barriers so that more women—especially women of color—can run for office, win elections, and lead at all levels of government. To advance social progress, we need a government that reflects the people it represents.
We support partners that help women—especially women of color—run for office and win, particularly at the state level. Women who participate in candidate training programs are more likely to get elected than women who do not.
While we need to increase women’s representation at all levels of government, state legislatures are an important place to start. State legislatures are powerhouses of policymaking, controlling billions in spending and writing the laws that govern people’s day-to-day lives on issues from voting to reproductive rights.
Electing more women to state legislatures not only advances social progress today but also deepens the bench of women qualified to serve at the highest levels of government tomorrow.
Many state legislatures are still controlled by traditional networks of power. We work with partners that support women in state legislatures, helping them govern effectively and advance agendas that drive social progress.
Our partners connect women legislators to mentors and networks, train them on effective policymaking and coalition-building, and support them with model legislation and research on key policy priorities.
For example, Sister District engages state legislators across the country, the majority of whom are women, through training, tools, and programming. Similarly, Future Caucus is launching a young women lawmaker group to provide a supportive community to women early in their political careers.
We work to tear down the structural barriers that keep our democracy from looking like the people it’s supposed to serve. By addressing issues like political violence, threats to elections, rising partisanship, and rules that make it hard for caregivers to hold office, we’re helping ensure women can fully participate in our political system.
Many women who run and win find that state capitols are not very friendly places to work, especially for legislators raising families. Our partner, Vote Mama, is addressing obstacles like low legislative pay, lack of paid leave, and in-person voting requirements that can involve a lot of onerous travel and time away from home.
We’re also working with partners to make sure that our democracy remains safe, fair, and responsive to the needs of constituents. As politics has become increasingly polarized, women—and especially women of color—have been targets of online disinformation and political violence. Since 2016, threats toward elected officials have risen 10x, and women running for local office are 3.4 times more likely to receive threats and harassment than men.
The States United Democracy Center is developing strategies to address this new danger to democracy—including monitoring social media to detect threats, liaising with local officials to help them respond appropriately, and training law enforcement officers to identify and limit risks.
