SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (WOMENSENEWS)–On the sidelines of all the primary campaigns going on right now we also have a less-visible but important nationwide effort focused on gender equality in political office.

It is aimed at women who have not considered running for political office as well as those who have been thinking about it and need encouragement to declare.

Recruitment is the key to achieving this goal. “If women run, women win,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Emerge America is the fastest-growing national political organization recruiting women to run for office. Founded in 2005, it is currently working in 14 states to recruit and train Democratic women to run for office. (Emerge California was founded earlier in 2002.)

Each December, Emerge begins an intensive seven-month, 70-hour training model that to date has trained 1,275 women. Since 2002, 47 percent of its graduates have run for office or been appointed to a board or commission. This year, it has 179 women running for office. Six are running for Congress in the states of California, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin.

Emerge success stories include Oregon’s Val Hoyle, who won a seat in the state legislature in 2009 and is now the Oregon house majority leader, and Wisconsin’s JoCasta Zamarripa, who became the first Latina elected to the Wisconsin legislature in 2010 and is now the Democratic caucus vice-chair.

In 2014 women have continued to lose ground in elected office across the country, finds a data analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics. The number of women running has decreased and too few are waiting in the pipeline to run when openings occur.

In their 2005 book “It Takes a Candidate,” Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox explain why women don’t run for office as frequently as men. Their research shows that:

Women put families and careers first, entering politics would be a “third job;”

Women believe they are not qualified;

Women are not recruited to be candidates by their political parties.

Lawless and Fox argue that the gender gap in political ambition is derived from “traditional gender socialization.” The proliferation and evolution of women’s political organizations have the potential to turn this around.

via Women Are Prepping to Run, Win and Take Office | Womens eNews.