Denise Gibson thought about running for Lawrence City Commission this year. But she had to get her son to the orthodontist instead.

“I have kids that really require a lot of energy and time right now,” said Gibson, who ran and lost in 1999. “They’re teenagers, but they’re not old enough to drive. They’re involved in so many activities … I’m always on the go with them.”

Gibson’s story may provide an answer to this question: Why, in a town known as perhaps the most progressive and feminist-friendly in Kansas, are there no women running for City Commission?

It’s not as though there’s a lack of female leadership in Lawrence. Women lead Haskell Indian Nations University, the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Lawrence Inc., and they have key leadership positions at City Hall, Kansas University and other major institutions.

And according to the 2000 Census, women outnumber men in Lawrence by a margin of 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent.

But they’ve never outnumbered men on the commission. The closest women came in recent years was 1995-97, when Jo Anderson and Bonnie Augustine served at the same time on the five-member board. Between 1999 and 2001, there were no female members, though two were defeated in the 1999 general election.

Nobody even has a chance to lose this time.

“It is fairly puzzling,” said Ann Cudd, director of women’s studies at Kansas University. “Why wouldn’t women sign up to run for Lawrence City Commission?”

Third shift?

One answer, Cudd said, might be that many women have moved into the business world — but also have retained duties as the primary child-raiser in the family.

“That’s the second shift of work,” Cudd said of home duties for women. “Who has time for a third shift in politics?”

No women are running for seats on the Lawrence City Commission this year. Denise Gibson, who ran for City Commission in 1999, considered running for Lawrence school board this year, but she said her children required too much time for her to run for office. Thursday Gibson accompanied her son, Kyle, 13, to the orthodontist for braces.

A Washington Post poll in the late 1990s agreed. It showed that working mothers did 20 hours of housework a week — and 10 hours of housework a week for their husbands.

“Women that I know, who have talked to me about running or whose names have come up, a lot of these women are working women, or they’re working mothers,” said Mayor Sue Hack, the last woman to run for commission and win. “And (the commission) takes an incredible amount of time.”

Planning Commissioner Jane Bateman agreed but suggested politics could still sometimes be a boys’ club.

“Maybe (women) are not in the same circles as the guys,” she said. “The coffee shops in the morning is where stuff gets talked about, where the motivation to do something happens, and as far as I can see, they’re full of guys.”

Hack said that hadn’t been her experience.

“I didn’t feel my being female had any pluses or minuses in terms of my campaign,” she said. “I hope that people didn’t look at it that way either.”

One more possibility: It’s just a coincidence that no women are after a city commission seat this election. After all, the governor of Kansas is a woman. Nearly a third of state legislators in Kansas are women, much higher than the national average.

And four of the 13 candidates for Lawrence School Board are women.

“It wasn’t a decision of one or the other,” said school board candidate Cindy Yulich, whose job as senior vice president of Emprise Bank would presumably put her in a good position to run for either board. “I simply have been involved in the schools for 11 years, and that’s where my interests lie and where I thought my experience would benefit the community.”

The difference

It’s hard to say that Sue Hack’s gender had anything to do with her vote, say, on banning fireworks during the July 4 holiday. So there’s disagreement on whether it even matters if women are running for city commission.

Hack said it does, at least in the big picture.

“I think sometimes women have a different way of articulating things and of looking at things,” she said. “I think anytime you bring diversity to a group of people that is making policy, I think that’s important. We have different perspectives, and I think it helps to bring that to a policy-making group.”

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Melinda Henderson, coordinator of the Progressive Lawrence Campaign, which backs a slate of candidates in the campaign, sees things differently.

“The person’s gender doesn’t matter to me, when you get down to it,” Henderson said. “I look at the qualifications of a candidate. I don’t know if females have any more qualifications than males to govern the city.”

So don’t expect to see any local effort to replicate “Emily’s List,” the national political action committee that supports women candidates for office.

“I don’t know,” Hack said, “that you can specifically encourage women to run as opposed to asking men to run.”

Gibson, meanwhile, said she would probably run for city commission again someday. She’s got to wait on her kids to get older.

“I’m thinking,” she said. “I’ll do it when they get out of high school maybe, or close to getting out of high school.”