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GOP needs to recruit more female candidates, report says

Republican Joni Ernst was elected to the Senate in November. J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press/File

WASHINGTON -- The Republican Party needs to inspire and recruit more female Congressional candidates to help bridge the staggering gap between the number of GOP and Democratic women in the Capitol, according to a detailed study by a non-partisan group.

While 104 women serve in the current Congress, only 28 are Republicans compared to 76 Democrats. This 3:1 ratio represents a modern gulf between the parties in female representation. In 1984, Congress featured 13 Republican and 12 Democratic women.

“Failure for us to use 100 percent of our talent and our intelligence is a mistake,” said Kerry M. Healey, a Republican who from 2003-07 served as Massachusetts lieutenant governor under Governor Mitt Romney and is now Babson College’s first female president. “We can’t win with half of our players on the field. We need to make this push and admit that gender does matter.”

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Healey moderated a panel in Washington at the launch of “Republican Women and the GOP Gender Gap: Clearing the Primary Hurdles,” a report conducted by Political Parity, a Cambridge-based, non-partisan organization dedicated to bringing more women into politics.

If the Republican Party keeps electing women to Congress at it’s current rate, it will be almost 100 years until the GOP catches up to current Democratic female representation, according to the report. Only 95 of 249 female Congressional candidates in 2014 were Republican, and only 22 were elected to Congress.

Bringing more women into the Republican’s congressional ranks could break Washington gridlock and create a bipartisan voting block focuses on women’s issues, said Swanee Hunt, the founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

“If they can work together, even one percent of the time, they can change the way the Senate works,” said Hunt, a Democrat who from 1993-97 was President William J. Clinton’s Ambassador to Austria. “If women were 30 percent of the Republican Party, you really would have a different Republican Party.”

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The report criticizes the failure of national GOP leadership to recruit and support female candidates. It also claims those women who do run fail in primaries because of insufficient funding from big money groups and misconceptions about how conservative they are compared to male counterparts.

The GOP instead needs to prioritize aggressively recruiting and developing conservative female activists into candidates, and must give them the financial and structural support they need to win, the panel insisted.

While Republican women in Congress are few and far between, the party can tout three ground-breaking additions in 2015. Senator Joni K. Ernst of Iowa is the state’s first female senator, and delivered the Republican response to Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. Representative Mia Love of Utah is the party’s first black congresswoman, and Representative Elise M. Stefanik of New York is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

To its credit. the Republican Party launched in June 2014 Project GROW-- Growing Republican Opportunities for Women-- to recruit, train and mentor female candidates. After 55 percent of American women voted for President Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee conducted a post-election autopsy and highlighted a need for more influential female figures.

Even so the, Healey said the GOP still has considerable work to do and ground to make up.

“We’ve traditionally been the backbone of the Republican Party,” she said, “but never the face.”

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Sylvan Lane can be reached at sylvan.lane@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @SylvanLane.