When Jamie Cassutt first won a race for a District 4 seat on the Santa Fe City Council in 2019, her victory marked a historic tipping point: For the first time anyone could remember, the council would have more women than men.

Cassutt, who hit the campaign trail with her then 14-month-old son in tow, is now in the middle of her second term, and her son is in elementary school.

Making history that night is still something she remembers fondly.

“I think it is important that we have so many women here,” Cassutt said. “I love that we’re getting a female perspective that we really have been fighting for, for a long time.”

Cassutt is now part of a supermajority of women on the city’s governing body, which has six women and three men, including Mayor Michael Garcia.

Santa Fe’s moniker as the City Different applies in the gender breakdown, unusual in a state where most municipal governments still skew male. Still, the city has had only one female mayor in its history, one-term firebrand Debbie Jaramillo, who was elected in 1994.

Current and past female city leaders say they believe the increased number of female councilors has led to a broader range of issues considered as part of the municipal government’s purview, particularly when it comes the needs of families and children.

Different set of priorities

“Local government really works best when it reflects the people that it serves, and more women in local leadership really helps make that possible,” said Estela Hernandez, executive director of Emerge New Mexico.

Emerge works to get Democratic women and nonbinary people elected to public offices in New Mexico, and hosts a candidate training session every year for women preparing to run.

While most candidates are usually interested in the state Legislature, Hernandez said this year’s cohort of 24 will include 10 women interested in running for city council, county commission or school board seats, a development she found exciting.

Hernandez said women slightly outnumber men in many New Mexico cities, including Santa Fe, which according to the most recent U.S. census was 51.5% female.

Santa Fe City Councilor Alma Castro and former Councilor Renee Villarreal are both alums of Emerge candidate trainings, and in 2024 Villarreal was named Emerge New Mexico’s Woman of the Year.

Villarreal on Friday said she believes representation on the basis of both gender and race in elected office is extremely important, though she noted just because a politician is a woman doesn’t automatically mean she will support “things that actually benefit women and more marginalized communities.”

As a District 1 councilor from 2016 through 2023, she said she sometimes felt “alone” in bringing up issues tied to gender equality, but she saw that shift as more women got elected.

Cassutt and Villarreal both said they believe the city has put more focus in recent years on how to support working families, with Cassutt noting access to child care is “incredibly crucial” for a strong economy.

“I think women tended to deal with things near and dear to their hearts that perhaps were more along the lines of civics and civil rights,” said former longtime City Councilor Patti Bushee, who served from 1994 to 2016.

The city’s first openly gay councilor, Bushee spearheaded several initiatives focused on civil rights, including a 1999 ordinance establishing Santa Fe as an “immigrant-friendly city.”

She also advocated for policies she saw as integral to child welfare, including protesting a proposed route for hauling radioactive waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southern New Mexico that would have passed by several Santa Fe schools.

Mirya Holman, a professor at the University of Houston and the author of Women in Politics in the American City, said women in local politics “generally prioritize a different set of policies than do men.”

“They’re much more interested in policymaking around issues that we might consider sort of traditional women’s issues, related to children, education, the welfare state, social services and caring for other people,” Holman said.

‘More scrutiny than men’

Women are underrepresented at every level of government except school boards, where their numbers are about equal, she said. They make up about 28% to 35% of mayors in the country, and between 30% and 35% of city councilors.

Women are more likely to be mayors of smaller cities than larger cities, she said, and more likely to be mayors of cities that do not have a “strong mayor” form of government.

“As cities invest more power in the mayor, then there’s a lower likelihood that women will either seek out or be elected to those positions,” Holman said.

Santa Fe in 2018 switched to a “strong mayor” form of government in which the mayor is the full-time chief executive and also sits on the governing body. However, a charter amendment approved in last year’s municipal election now limits the mayor’s voting power to a tie-breaking role.

Jaramillo, who was a controversial figure, served from 1994 to 1998 when the role was still a part-time position.

“She was a bit of a rough ride, but honestly, she got more done than all the guys combined in her one term,” Bushee said of Jaramillo, who first appointed her to the council.

Several former councilors said they were dismayed the city has yet to have a second female mayor.

“It’s shocking that we’ve only had one in our history in Santa Fe,” Villarreal said.

She couldn’t account for the reason, though she said women “get more scrutiny than men do,” both on the campaign trail and in office.

“I think we still have some draconian ideas about what women can do and how qualified women have to be,” said former City Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler, adding she believes female candidates need to be significantly more qualified than male candidates to be taken seriously.

Vigil Coppler ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2021 and 2025. In last year’s eight-way, ranked-choice election, she noted, the four male candidates received the top four spots and the female candidates the last four.

“That is some B.S., if you ask me,” she said. “I didn’t know Santa Fe was so closed-minded.”

Bushee said when she experienced overt discrimination, it was more likely to be tied to her sexual orientation than her gender. It was when she ran unsuccessfully against Javier Gonzales for mayor in 2014 when she felt gender became more of an issue.

“There are those that will vote for women readily, and then there’s generations that aren’t used to voting for women, so they’re not going to,” she said.

‘A real boys’ club’

While mayors are overwhelmingly male, Holman’s research shows the role of city manager skews even more heavily male. A 2017 paper from Holman states only 13% of city managers were women in 2014, though more recent studies show rates rising since.

The highest-ranking woman in the city’s administration is currently Deputy City Manager Andrea Phillips, who before coming to Santa Fe had served as town manager in the Colorado municipalities of Mancos and Pagosa Springs, as well as interim city manager in Grand Junction.

Phillips said her gender wasn’t a major factor in any of her past roles. While people had occasionally made comments that could be interpreted in a gendered way, she said, “I just try to keep doing the work.”

{{tncms-asset app=”editorial” id=”b134e600-4822-4860-9d30-2bee416ce07f”}}

“Being a manager, no matter what your gender, you’ve got to be someone that cares about the job and is able to work with different kinds of people,” she said.

Phillips said higher-level roles can be harder to access for women, especially mothers, who are often more reticent about uprooting their family for a role in a new city or working jobs that require long evening hours spent at public meetings.

However, she encourages women interested in working in local government to go for it: “I think it’s a good place to be, but I’m a little biased,” she said.

A number of other women have held high-ranking positions in Santa Fe city government in recent years, including Erin McSherry, the former city attorney; Kyra Ochoa, the former community health and safety director; Jarel LaPan Hill, a former city manager, and Julie Sanchez, the former Youth and Family Services director.

That wasn’t always the case, said Sanchez, who worked for the city between 2016 and 2025. She said in a July interview former Mayor Alan Webber deserved credit for doing a lot to professionalize city government, including hiring many women.

Prior to that, it was “a real boys’ club,” she said.

Vigil Coppler, who was the city’s human resources director under the administration of former Mayor Sam Pick, said when she was a city employee there were typically only one or two female city councilors at a time.

It wasn’t always a welcoming environment for them, she said, noting a situation in which a female councilor was sexually harassed by a top city employee.

Gaps in city policy?

While things have improved since then, Vigil Coppler said she still experienced discrimination during her time in office and believes there are gaps in the city’s current sexual harassment policies.

The city’s code of ethics covers bullying but not sexual harassment, and many of its personnel rules do not apply to nonexempt employees or elected officials, she said, leaving them little resource except legal action.

“We’ve come a long way, but we haven’t come a long way enough,” she said.

The city has had a Women’s Commission since 2020, but reports on its work have been sparse. In 2024 the commission gave a presentation to the City Council about gender disparities in city government; it has not come before the council since. Agendas for several recent commission meetings have listed “harassment policy recommendation” as an item.

Villarreal said she experienced “microaggressions” on the City Council more than overt discrimination tied to her gender. She also said she believes some of the treatment she experienced was because she is Latina and was relatively young when elected.

She said she believes the city’s ranked-choice voting system and public financing option makes it easier for women to get their foot in the door, and she is encouraged that an upcoming Charter Review Commission will study the balance of power between the mayor and the City Council, saying she at times felt shut out.

“If you’re not in the inner circle with whoever’s the mayor at the moment, then that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be put in leadership roles like chairing committees, even though you’re capable and have the tenure to do so,” she said.

Cassutt said she wants to be held to a high standard as a politician, noting she felt somewhat uncomfortable on the campaign trail when some people said they were voting for her because she was the woman in the race.

“I would actually like you to vote for me because you think I’m your best candidate,” she recalled thinking.

While she didn’t always see eye to eye with other female councilors on the dais, Bushee said she is almost always happy to vote for a woman and is glad they are more of a presence now in the political realm.

“I am really happy that we have some strong women in politics in New Mexico,” she said. 

Republish This Story

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.