By Yashar Ali for Huffington Post – Every election season, I ask myself the same question: Why aren’t more women running for public office?

Over the past ten years, I have been hopeful for the prospect and rise of women political candidates. While I never studied the numbers, I felt like we were heading in the right direction.

I couldn’t be more wrong.

Reporter Kate Linthicum’s brilliant Los Angeles Times article sheds light on the City of Los Angeles’ problem with proper female representation on the city council. The fifteen-member council, which had five female members eleven years ago, may soon have no female representation.

Current statistics about women holding federal office are equally dismal: women hold fewer than 20 percent of House and Senate seats. The House faced its first decline in 30 years with respect to women members.

Women hold fewer than 25 percent of seats in state legislatures. This sort of decline has not been seen in decades.

Why are we slipping back after so many years of slow but steady progress?

There exist real obstacles for prospective women politicians: media bias, lack of financial support, mediocre recruitment efforts, underfunded organizations built to help women run for public office.

I want to introduce a not-so-prominent problem: the serious deficiency of women in senior positions on political campaigns. With the exception of political fundraisers, you find very few women running campaigns or serving in top management spots.

The absence of women operating behind the scenes of political campaigns has been largely ignored. This is made clear by the complete absence of studies tracking the numbers of women working in politics. Open your newspaper and turn on your TV. You usually hear a senior-level male staffer speaking for candidates.

This isn’t just about my ideology. This is personal for me.

For the past two and half years, I worked for California Lieutenant Governor and former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. In my last position with him, I managed his 2010 race for Lieutenant Governor.

Lieutenant Governor Newsom and his wife, actress and documentary filmmaker, Jennifer Siebel Newsom (check out her brilliant documentary about women’s under-representation in positions of power and the limited and often disparaging portrayal of women in the media) expressed in this campaign their frustration and concern about the lack of women working on his campaigns.

Lieutenant Governor Newsom always asked, when we made hiring decisions, whether we could fill these posts with qualified women. This was not just a question for him. In his first year as mayor, he appointed San Francisco’s first female police chief and fire chief. He was also the first mayor to initiate gender analysis of budget cuts.

But I couldn’t find available and qualified women to take senior positions in his campaign. The few women I did know were already working on other campaigns.

Shawnda Westly, Executive Director of the California Democratic Party, saw a need to fix this problem in California. She, along with her colleague Robin Swanson, put their money where their mouth is, and launched a website called Political Women California.

Political Women California delivers a simple, but powerful mission: to give women working in politics a place to post their resumes so employers can find and hire them for campaigns, elections and political positions throughout California — and across the country.

Their site has been flooded with postings from women already working in politics in California. Even though I am not in the business of managing campaigns anymore, it helped me realize how many women are trying to work in politics.

Usually, people run for office after being exposed to a political campaign in one way or another. So the question is: how do we expect young women to motivate themselves to run for public office when all the people running campaigns are men?

To read the Huffington Post Blog post, click here.