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LOS ALTOS — Penny Lave has twice served as mayor of Los Altos, and she helped launch the Peninsula community’s women’s caucus. But it wasn’t until she went to a meeting this month of Los Altos’ newly elected City Council and glanced up at the dais that it struck her.
Seated above her was an all-female city council, the only one in California and just the third in the history of the Golden State.
“It’s quite amazing,” Lave, 81, said. “I didn’t really think of it until they were inducted; that’s when I thought, ‘This is really something.”’
In contrast, all-male councils aren’t nearly as unusual here: 56 California cities, or about 12 percent, had no women serving on their councils in 2017, the latest year figures are available.
Los Altos’ milestone came during the second so-called “Year of the Woman,” in which voters in November sent a record number of women to Congress and to state legislatures nationwide. During the first “Year of the Woman,” in 1992 after the Anita Hill hearings, California became the first state to be represented in the U.S. Senate by two women. Since then, five other states — Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Washington — have sent female duos to the Senate.
But nationwide, activists say it remains unusual for any of the country’s more than 19,000 cities and towns to be represented only by women, making Los Altos a special case.
“It’s such a novelty,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Politics and Women at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Before the November election, Los Altos only had one man on the City Council, Jean Mordo, who lost his re-election bid. He and four women ran for two seats. The winners, attorney Neysa Fligor, and retired international business consultant Anita Enander, both said no one set out to make the council all women.
“It was just kind of happenstance,” said Enander, who had served as a city planning commissioner. She said the main focus of the election appeared to be on land use and development in a low-density community where residential lots are at least a quarter acre in size.
Fligor agreed no one planned the milestone, but she said it’s thrilling anyway.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m proud of it.”
Experts say it’s still unclear if the national gains from women trickled down to the local level in California. The nonprofit California Women Lead will report on the results of city council races here in March.
But the only cities prior to Los Altos that have had all-female councils here were Pacifica (in 1992) and the small Humboldt County town of Blue Lake (last year). Blue Lake’s tenure was short-lived, however; by late August, two councilwomen in the tiny community of 1,265 people had stepped down, and a man and a woman who were appointed to replace them won in November.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, only one city in the Bay Area region — Richmond — is believed last month to have elected an all-male city council, whose new members will be sworn in shortly. While some are confident that gender — either all-male or all-female — is immaterial, others expressed concern about Richmond’s homogeneity.
“That visual of an all-male city council is a very loud statement that we’re sort of going backward,” said current Richmond Councilwoman Jovanka Beckles, who ran unsuccessfully for state Assembly rather than re-election in Richmond and will be leaving office.
Women in local government are most prevalent often on local school boards, researchers say. Among the barriers to running: explicit gender biases that keep women from seeking or holding office, lack of confidence and low pay. Some working women who already may find it difficult to juggle their full-time jobs and responsibilities at home also may not want to take on what amounts to a third job in elected office.
In the affluent city of Los Altos, Mordo, 73, was the only man to run this year for City Council. Now that he’s off the council, he said he is looking forward to having enough free time to travel. But he expressed some regret about losing, saying “it’s nice to have gender balance” and attributing his loss in part to his style.
“I was perhaps, being a male, perhaps a little more result-oriented,” Mordo said. “I wanted to move things along. Now, that element — the pushing — is going to be missing.”
However, Lave, who served as mayor in 1989 and 1993, is hopeful the new council will forge a new path. In the run-up to the November election, the local newspaper, the Los Altos Town Crier, wrote that, “All one has to do is watch a couple of council meetings and it is obvious there is an unhealthy level of tension among council members.”
“It’s not that previous councils didn’t work, it’s just there was back-biting and calling people out,” Lave said. “This maybe will be the time when everyone gets along.”
