Despite record gains in the 2018 elections, women are still a small fraction of elected officials, comprising 23.7  percent of the U.S. Congress and 28.8  percent of state legislators. https://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/women-elective-office-2019 Connecticut’s numbers are only slightly better: 32.6  percent of state legislators are women, as is 28.5 percent of our congressional delegation.  But Connecticut law makes it harder for women to decide to run, because although you can use campaign funds to pay for your spouse’s dinner at campaign events, you can’t use them to pay for child care.

Caitlin Clarkson Pereira discovered this when she ran for state representative in 2018. She sought to use campaign funds for babysitting after her three-year-old became exhausted going door-to-door with her in the summer heat.  Pereira was not seeking payment for the childcare she already uses to work fulltime, but simply for the extra care needed so she could fulfill the off-hour obligations campaigning requires. When she checked with the State Elections Enforcement Commission, however, the Commission told her that because she had received a grant from the Citizens Elections Program, she could not use campaign funds–public or private–for childcare. The Commission issued a formal declaratory ruling on the question on April 3, 2019. https://seec.ct.gov/Portal/data/AdvisoryOpinions/DR201902UseofCampaignFunds.pdf