Word: mayoring
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Qalibaf does, at least, look for common ground with Americans. At this years' annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he struck up a conversation with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on the threat of earthquakes facing their cities. The two men agreed to stay in contact. Might that dialogue prefigure an even more seismic shift in cooperation between Iran and the U.S.? "That's possible!" Qalibaf exclaims. Yet until Iran satisfies international concerns about its nuclear ambitions, it will take more than optimistic words to end the 30-year breach between Tehran and Washington...
Still, in a handful of cities and towns, women make up the majority of the local government. Take McLean, Texas, a town off Old Route 66 that has a single stoplight. McLean has a female mayor and, despite the gendered nature of the word, a board of aldermen that is half women. In fact, until its most recent election, the board was entirely female. McLean, pop. 830, also has a female postmaster, justice of the peace, newspaper editor and principal of the schools. "We had a previous administration that had internal problems. People around town kept asking...
...women of Casselberry, Fla., had an unlikely inspiration to run for local office: strip clubs. "We'd become known as a red-light district," says vice mayor Colleen Hufford. "All the other cities in our area were flourishing, and we were seeing ours deteriorate." Hufford, with several other women, started holding meetings for community members to discuss the situation. They formed a political action committee and ran candidates for the city commission in 2006. Today, three commissioners are members of the group, and they've brought in a female city manager, city attorney and city clerk. The women have spearheaded...
Rosanne Foust, the mayor of Redwood City, Calif. - where the seven-person city council has four female members - says women bring a different quality to city government. "The women and men balance each other," she says. "Women look more at what's not being said, at underlying motivations." Foust, 44, is an unusually young female mayor. Walsh notes that a major reason for women's underrepresentation is that younger women already have the difficult task of balancing work and family; the women who do go into politics tend to do so later in life and thus have shorter political careers...
Walsh notes one final reason women don't run for office as often as men: they haven't had as many role models. In Galveston, Texas, five-sevenths of the city council is female, and Lyda Ann Thomas is the city's third female mayor. "The first was in the 1970s," she says. "I think the male population was a bit surprised at the fact that a lady was elected mayor, but that opened the door for women. Somebody had to start the trend...