WGBH News investigates gender diversity in local politics with ambitious digital project
Source: WGBH
More than 500. That’s how many phone calls and emails Laura Colarusso, WGBH News digital managing editor, and Emily Judem, digital producer, made to Massachusetts city and town governments to gather information about women in local politics for their recent feature, The Original Old Boys’ Club. Through nearly a year of reporting and data gathering, they sought to answer this question: Why is Massachusetts, one of the most progressive states in the country, lagging when it comes to electing women to political office?
“I had been reading a lot about the Year of the Woman,” said Colarusso. “The stats for the number of women in politics for our federal and state level officials are really easy to come by. And so I started wondering: ‘What does it look like at the selectboard level?’”
About a decade ago, while working for The Boston Globe, Colarusso covered four towns: Reading, North Reading, Wilmington and Needham. At the time, two of the twenty select board members for those towns were women. Ten years later, little has changed.
Click here to read the full article published by WGBH on 18 April 2019.
More than 500. That’s how many phone calls and emails Laura Colarusso, WGBH News digital managing editor, and Emily Judem, digital producer, made to Massachusetts city and town governments to gather information about women in local politics for their recent feature, The Original Old Boys’ Club. Through nearly a year of reporting and data gathering, they sought to answer this question: Why is Massachusetts, one of the most progressive states in the country, lagging when it comes to electing women to political office?
“I had been reading a lot about the Year of the Woman,” said Colarusso. “The stats for the number of women in politics for our federal and state level officials are really easy to come by. And so I started wondering: ‘What does it look like at the selectboard level?’”
About a decade ago, while working for The Boston Globe, Colarusso covered four towns: Reading, North Reading, Wilmington and Needham. At the time, two of the twenty select board members for those towns were women. Ten years later, little has changed.
Click here to read the full article published by WGBH on 18 April 2019.
