Philly, it’s time for a woman mayor | Opinion

The job of mayor is not a glamorous one, especially not when it comes to being the mayor of America’s poorest large city. It’s a job for someone willing to get their hands dirty, someone who will make sure the trash gets picked up on time, someone who truly cares about keeping us safe, someone who will listen to everyone whine about what they need and want, someone who won’t scoff at cleaning up filth — both literal and figurative, someone who can work 24/7 for little to no praise or recognition.

That job description reminds me of someone: every woman I’ve ever known. Or at least it is very similar to my own life as a woman, mother, wife, and full-time co-breadwinner juggling a million plates and two toddlers and hoping nothing crashes to the floor in a million pieces.

After 99 mayors over the last 321 years, I can’t help but think that our city doesn’t need yet another father figure.

In the fall of 2023, Philadelphians will have the chance to change the future of our city. (OK, let’s get real: In the spring of 2023, because we all know that in this heavily Democratic city, it’s the primary that matters.) In the face of skyrocketing crime, a struggling school system, and a dire lack of affordable housing, we can no longer accept the status quo. Voters need to choose something completely different on Nov. 7, 2023. They need to choose Philadelphia’s first woman mayor.

Women are not necessarily better leaders than men in every circumstance — and surely someone (likely, a man) somewhere (likely, on the internet) has a list of the worst screwups by women politicians. But women do tend to lead differently. And something different is exactly what our city needs right now because the status quo perpetuated during Mayor Jim Kenney’s two terms has left Philadelphia worse off than it was eight years ago. According to a new poll by the nonpartisan advocacy group A Greater Philadelphia, 54.6% of registered Democrats in Philadelphia think the city is going in the wrong direction.

“Women are particularly suited to a job like mayor because they are the ultimate multitaskers. They manage so many things,” Judge Marjorie O. Rendell recently told me. Judge Rendell has an intimate knowledge of what it takes to be mayor. She witnessed it during her husband Ed’s two terms at the helm of the city in the 1990s.

A lot of generalizations get thrown around when talking about the differences between female and male leaders. One of them is that women tend to lead with more emotion and compassion than men. This actually hasn’t been borne out by empirical research, even though I have seen it to be true in my experience in corporate jobs — but what we do know is that women tend to have a broader sort of empathy and lived experiences that many men simply can’t bring to the table: the lived experience of being a single mother, a primary caregiver, someone who consistently provides unpaid labor to their families and their communities. This is not necessarily better experience. It’s just different.

When we choose to elect a woman, we are choosing to elect someone with vastly different experiences living in our city than male leaders, someone who can bring the point of view of a community that has long been marginalized in our city. For too long our city has been largely led by straight cisgendered men, the majority of them white and highly educated. They are not representative of the majority of the people they govern (according to the April 2020 census, men make up only 47.3% of the city’s population), and when that is the case, issues get missed or overlooked.

“You do things the same way, you get the same results that benefit the same people‚” explained Christina Reynolds, the vice president of communications for EMILY’S List, one of the largest national fund-raising arms for women in politics. “It has become clear that the experience you bring to office is not just the jobs you’ve had, but your lived experience. ... When we bring people into leadership who have had different experiences you get a more representative government, and that is a good thing.”

The 2023 mayoral field is still wide open, but there are at least six women rumored to be running for the office, among them City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart and Councilmembers Cindy Bass, Helen Gym, Cherelle Parker, and Maria Quiñones-Sánchez.

These potential candidates are in good company. More and more women are taking the helm of major cities in the United States and abroad. As of 2021, 25.1% of mayors of cities with a population of more than 30,000 in the United States were women. Of the 100 most populous cities in the United States, 31 are led by women mayors. Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, and Sydney are all governed by women.

The fact that we haven’t yet had a female chief executive in the city doesn’t necessarily boil down to an inherent misogyny here in Philly. The number of successful female councilmembers suggests that Philadelphia’s electorate is willing to elect women. When it comes to mayor, it may be more a matter of the right person at the right time, the stars aligning for the right candidate — and we haven’t seen nearly enough women candidates running for mayor to truly test how Philadelphians would respond at the polls.

Women generally tend to run for higher office less frequently than men. There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of the major reasons is that running for office is a grueling and life-altering experience, one that many women who are already juggling multiple caretaking roles might be loath to take on.

Community activist and Councilmember Happy Fernandez was the first major-party female candidate to run in Philly, in 1999. She came in fourth in the Democratic primary. Councilmember Blondell Reynolds Brown was expected by many to run for mayor in 2012. When asked about a potential run she cited the difficulty of making it work while raising her teenage daughter, the financial challenges, the personal sacrifices, the fact that she was already “walking a tightrope backwards in heels.”

After serving as district attorney longer than anyone else in the city’s history, Lynne Abraham decided to throw her hat in the ring for the mayor’s race in 2015, ultimately finishing third in the Democratic primary. Many say that Abraham saw her prospects dashed after fainting during an onstage event due to reported dehydration. Anyone, male or female, could have fainted on a stage, but any sign of weakness on the campaign trail is much harder for a woman candidate to overcome than a man.

Those three women bore the burden of being the only woman in the race. It’s never easy being the only one. You will always be inherently judged on the one thing that makes you different. But now we have the potential to have several strong women candidates on the Democratic ballot for mayor. By competing against one another, these candidates will hopefully be judged less on their gender and more on their records and their plans to turn Philadelphia around, to get their hands dirty, to get things done — like a woman.

Jo Piazza is a former political journalist and the bestselling author of the novels Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, about a woman running for Senate in Pennsylvania, and We Are Not Like Them.