More than a century after the first women were elected to the General Assembly, women are moving closer to parity with men in the state legislature.
When the General Assembly gavels in Wednesday for a new session, 41 of the 100 members of the House of Delegates will be women. That will rise to 43 with the results of Tuesday’s special elections for two seats in Northern Virginia — then might dip to 42 if Del. Elizabeth Parker-Bennett is elected to the state Senate in a special election next month. Of course, that number could also go back to 43 if a woman is elected to succeed Parker-Bennett. (You can see how these numbers have changed over the years in this visual presentation by the Virginia Public Access Project.)
Any of those numbers represents a record for Virginia and moves the Old Dominion closer to the top of such rankings nationally, but still not in the top 10.
At the moment, between the House and Senate (which wasn’t on the ballot in November), 42.1% of the state legislators in Virginia are women. The Center for American Women and Politics says that would put Virginia 11th in the country for the percentage of state legislative seats held by women. The leader is Nevada, where 61.9% of the legislators are women. Two other states, New Mexico (54.5%) and Colorado (52.0%), are majority female. Seven states, all in or near the South, have legislatures where fewer than a quarter of the legislators are women. The lowest female representation is in West Virginia, where only 11.9% of the legislators are women.
The legislature that convenes Wednesday will also include an unusual number of new members — although not a record. Once all the special elections are done, there will be at least 21 — maybe 22 — new delegates in the 100-member House. That means more than a fifth of the body will have turned over in just two years.
We sometimes overlook the pace of turnover in state government.
Two-thirds of the House of Delegates — 66 of 100 members — have joined since the 2019 elections that produced the 2020 legislature.
The days of turnover occurring at a glacial pace seem to be over.
In last year’s legislative session, the delegate who had the least seniority was Democrat J.J. Singh of Loudoun County, who joined in January 2025. After last November’s election, he moved up to 83rd on the seniority list and now will move up a few more spots after the special elections are done.
When multiple legislators are elected at once, as they were in November, they draw lots to determine seniority. Of those new legislators, Democrat Lily Franklin of Montgomery County was the unlucky one. She wound up 100th — but now has already moved up with three delegates leaving to join the governor’s cabinet. She’ll move up another spot if Bennett-Parker is elected to the state Senate. Bennett-Parker is a good example of how quickly legislators are moving up now. She entered the House just four years ago and is already 46th in seniority.
That said, the House has three members who were elected in the last century: Republican Terry Kilgore of Scott County (who entered the House in 1994), Democrat Vivian Watts of Fairfax County (who entered in 1996 but previously served in the 1980s) and Republican Lee Ware of Powhatan County (who joined in 1998).
The 40-member Senate has one member elected in the 1990s: Democrat Louise Lucas of Portsmouth joined in 1992. Democrat Creigh Deeds of Charlottesville entered in 2001 but previously served in the House, and entered that chamber in 1992. Those two would count as the two most senior members of the legislature — unless you count Watts, who joined in 1982 and served until becoming Gov. Gerald Baliles’ secretary of transportation in 1986, and then returned later to the House in 1996.
If all those names sound familiar, it’s because seniority matters in the legislature, and all those Democrats are often in the news because they’re committee chairs — and keepers of the institutional memory of a legislature that traces its roots back to 1619, making it the oldest continuous legislative body in the hemisphere.
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