Is Wyoming Living Up to Its ‘Equality State’ Legacy? | Best States

While many might know it as the Cowboy State, another one of Wyoming’s nicknames is the Equality State, a nod to Wyoming’s early steps toward equal rights for women.

In 1869, the Wyoming Territory became the first of any state or territory to permanently give women the right to vote and hold office – 50 years before Congress passed the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women across the country. The next year, it swore in the country’s first female justice of the peace, jurors and bailiffs, and in 1924, the state elected the country’s first female governor.

But while the long lists of firsts may seem impressive, some aspects of gender equality in modern-day Wyoming can seem at odds with its nickname.

In a 2022 analysis, U.S. News ranked Wyoming 45th out of the 50 states for gender equality. The state lagged behind other states most in two categories – representation and power, and family planning – and struggled to see gender parity across a number of metrics, including college graduation rates, mental health and affordability of being a single parent.

Jennifer Simon, founder of Wyoming Women’s Action Network, a women-focused advocacy group, recalls how the late journalist Cokie Roberts summarized the state’s history with gender equality during her keynote speech at a Wyoming Women’s Legislative Caucus conference in 2019.

“I’ll never forget how eloquently she characterized something I often felt but never quite had words for,” remembers Simon. “‘Wyoming has had a lot of firsts, but not a lot of seconds.’”

Some think it was a joke or an attempt at attracting women to the mostly male territory. Others say the law was the result of Democrats’ resentment of the 15th Amendment, which enfranchised Black men months earlier.

Regardless of lawmakers’ intentions, the 1869 women’s suffrage law was the beginning of more than a century’s worth of slow but sure progress toward equal representation in Wyoming’s state government.

Female representation in the state Legislature hit a peak in the mid-1980s, when more than 25% of state legislators were women, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. At that point, Wyoming led the nation in female representation.

But by 2017, that share was down to just 11.1%. And today, it’s clear other states have outpaced Wyoming: Women make up 21.5% of its Legislature, down from the national average of 32.7% and the eighth-lowest share of female state legislators in the country.

“We did have a lot of steam,” says Republican state Sen. Affie Ellis, who represents part of Cheyenne in southeastern Wyoming. “I think what we’ve asked ourselves is, ‘What happened after the 1920s, 1930s?’ We had all this momentum and attention.”

One possible explanation for the decline in female legislators is a change the state made to its electoral system in 1992. After a federal court ruling, Wyoming reapportioned all of its electoral districts to be single-member districts, meaning voters choose one candidate rather than multiple. Research indicates fewer women may run and be elected from single-member districts.

This system also can make races more contentious, a factor that may discourage women from running, according to Republican state Rep. Sandy Newsome, who represents part of northwest Wyoming. Newsome says she “lost probably 15 pounds” over the course of her last election thanks to the hostility of the race.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it was horrible,” she says. “Am I glad I did it? I am. But I can’t in good conscience tell a woman that it’s not going to be that way for them.”

The unique structure of the state’s legislative body may also be to blame for its lack of female representation.

As a citizen legislature, its members serve part time, have no staff and likely have another job. They are paid a per-diem amount and do not receive benefits like health insurance. Lawmakers only meet in the winter – a vestige of Wyoming’s agriculture industry – coming together for 40 days in odd-number years and 20 days in even-numbered years. Meetings take place at the state Capitol in Cheyenne, which can be as long as a seven-hour drive from other parts of Wyoming.

All of these facts combine to make serving in the Legislature a difficult task for women, and mothers in particular, experts and politicians say.

“Many women who are caretakers to their family members – whether that be parents, or children or both – that type of absence is very difficult, not only from potentially their employment, but also their families,” says Republican state Sen. Tara Nethercott, who represents part of Cheyenne. “It’s a very difficult situation for many women to undertake.”

Contraceptive Deserts, High Maternal Mortality

With the largest gender wage gap for single parents, single mothers in Wyoming make just 53 cents for every dollar a single father makes, according to data from the 2021 American Community Survey. And that pay disparity has implications for child care affordability. Given the average single mother makes just over $31,600 annually in the state, the approximate $10,000 price tag for center-based child care can easily cost single mothers one-third of their salaries annually, compared with one-sixth of a typical salary ($59,200) for single fathers.

Women in the state also face a high maternal mortality rate relative to many other states, at more than 32 deaths per 100,000 births between 2011 and 2020, and restricted access to birth control in many counties considered “contraceptive deserts.”

In March, Wyoming became the first in the country to ban abortion pills, though a judge has since put the law on hold while a lawsuit proceeds. The ban would have significant ramifications for the state, which has just two abortion clinics, only one of which performs surgical abortions.

In what Simon of the Wyoming Women’s Action Network describes as an additional blow to women in rural regions of the state, two Wyoming hospitals closed their maternity wards last year, no longer providing labor and delivery services due to staffing and financial challenges.

Limited access to abortion clinics and closures like these can have widespread consequences for women, according to Simon. Indeed, a 2022 U.S. News analysis found that access to abortion services correlates strongly with gender equality.

“There are certainly plenty of studies over the last five decades indicating that access to birth control pills, access to family planning, access to reproductive health is really incredibly determinative for women’s economic self-sufficiency,” says Simon.

But it’s not all dire, she says. In March, Wyoming’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, signed House Bill 4 into law, extending postpartum Medicaid coverage for new mothers from 60 days to a year, at least through March of 2027.

The bill had the backing of women’s advocacy groups as well as the governor, who branded it as a pro-life measure.

Simon says the extension is vital because “there’s so much impact on new moms after giving birth,” noting that more than half of pregnancy-related deaths occur between a week and a year after delivery.

In addition to family planning and care, Wyoming also struggles with achieving economic equality between men and women. Despite having one of the highest levels of gender equality in labor force participation, the state has one of the highest gender wage gaps, though it has closed somewhat in the last 20 years.

In 2021, women in the U.S. earned 83.1% of their male counterparts’ earnings, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet women in Wyoming earned even less: For every dollar a man made in the Equality State, women made just over 75 cents – putting the state behind only Utah for the largest wage gap in the country.

Wyoming’s wage gap is not new. The state has long been ranked one of the last in terms of wage disparity, and many say this persistent gap can be attributed to the state’s economy. Engineering and mining are some of the top industries in Wyoming, which is one of the country’s largest coal producers. They are also industries that tend to be dominated by men.

According to a 2022 report from the University of Wyoming and the Wyoming Women’s Foundation, almost half of men in the state earn degrees in science or engineering, while the most popular major for women is education. The average pay for engineers in Wyoming is more than $83,000, the report finds, while the state’s teachers earn around $63,000.

“That’s a lot of where our statewide wage gap comes from – it’s just the nature of jobs in Wyoming,” says Newsome, the GOP state lawmaker

But others say there’s more to the story.

“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,” says Rebekah Smith Hazelton, director of the Wyoming Women’s Foundation, a statewide fund focused on ensuring women’s economic self-sufficiency. “I think if you look at the wages of the female-dominated occupations, you’ll find that they’re paid less than the national average, whereas some of these higher-paying jobs that are dominated by men are paid more than the national average.”

Cathy Connolly – who has studied the state’s wage gap as the former Democratic minority leader of the state’s House of Representatives and a former gender and women’s studies professor at the University of Wyoming – believes Wyoming’s wage gap is a product of the state’s business-friendly mindset.

“Wyomingites loathe, loathe, loathe, loathe to consider ourselves anything other than business-friendly,” says Connolly, the state’s first openly gay legislator. “We have had bills [about wage transparency] that have all failed because they’re perceived to be telling businesses what to do.”

In 2021, Connolly sponsored the Workplace Transparency Act, which would have prevented employers from forbidding their employees from discussing their wages and from punishing employees for doing so. The bill failed to move out of committee.

Advocates like Simon say the state needs to address its gender inequalities in order to stem the flow of young women out of the state.

Wyoming’s population of young people aged 25-29 has consistently declined in recent years, shrinking by nearly 16% between 2017 and 2021, according to Census Bureau estimates. In that time frame, the state’s population of women in the same age range declined by nearly 21% while the respective population of men declined by just over 11%.

“They’re running into the real effects of those policy decisions and it becomes almost impossible for them to stay,” Simon says. “I want this state to be a great place for all of the young women I know who have gone to college to come back and live their lives, raise their families.”

Julia Haines contributed reporting to this article.