BOSTON — Reluctant as I am to steal the spotlight from Florida, we here in Massachusetts have a small political announcement:
Florida may have pregnant chads, but we have a pregnant lieutenant governor.
Florida may be laboring mightily with a battalion of legal midwives to get one candidate out of the Votomatic birth canal, but Jane Swift is having twins.
This is not an exercise in one-upswoman-ship, I assure you. I repeat this only because, in the end, Jane Swift's maternity dress may have more meaning, at least for the future of women in politics, than Katherine Harris' St. John knits.
Call this the year of the tie, not the skirt. But election 2000 will bring a record number of women, The Lucky Thirteen, to the Senate. It will also clock a record number of women — 59 — going to the House of Representatives.
But at the other end of the pipeline, the entry level end, 2000 was a downer. There will actually be fewer women in state legislatures than there were in 1999.
Women had been inching up, point by point, since 1971, when only 4.5 percent of state reps and senators were women. By the 1990s the figure had risen to nearly a quarter. As Debbie Walsh, the head of the Center for American Women and Politics — and a mother of twins — says, "We always said that it would be slow steady growth of one or two points a year."
But in 1994 they began to plateau and now, for the first time, there's a decline. The drop from 1,670 to 1,659 is not precipitous, but we can no longer assume the escalator will keep going up. This is disappointing, not just for state government itself but also for the much lauded "pipeline."
State legislatures vary enormously — from Alabama with only 8 percent women to Washington with 41 percent. But this is where women such as new U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan got started.
There is lots of speculation on why the numbers have plateaued, but it's clear that women aren't entering politics in the same numbers they are entering law, medicine or even journalism. It's not that women aren't winning; it's that enough aren't running.
Gary Moncrief, a political scientist from Boise State University, finds that men are more likely to jump into politics while women need more encouragement. In fact, as Sue Thomas of Georgetown has shown, men dream and plan their political lives earlier.
The biggest hurdle may not be the dream but the reality: the same epidemic difficulty of balancing family with overwork. Add to that campaigning and commuting. Nationwide, women are less likely to run if they have small children.
We won't get 50 women in the Senate or one in the White House until we get more in the statehouses. It's going to be a pretty dry pipeline unless women are dreaming and running sooner.
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.