Chatham University

Women’s Leadership

Dana Brown ready to engage the region as the new director of Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy

Click here to read an interview with Dana Brown in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Dana M. Brown is ready to continue Chatham’s commitment to further advance the civic engagement of women throughout the Commonwealth. This July she begins her tenure as the new director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy and assistant professor of political science at Chatham University. The Center remains the first of its kind to focus specifically on women’s political involvement in Pennsylvania.

“The mission of the Center is not only to educate the public on the paucity of women in Pennsylvania politics, but to increase the number of women in office,” Ms. Brown said. “The Center will reach out to women across the state from all political spectrums through campaign and lobbying trainings while applying pressure to state party leaders to actively recruit women. In Pennsylvania we need a change in culture and attitude toward women in politics.”

Ms. Brown is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in American Politics and Women and Politics at Rutgers University and currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Allegheny College. She has presented research on women in politics, political psychology, political media and political participation by women of color.

She has been an Eagleton Fellow at the Eagleton Institute of Politics and PLEN Coordinator at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. Ms. Brown has also been Research Assistant at the National Asian American Survey (NAAS) and has completed additional graduate work in political and social research at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She earned her MA in political science from Rutgers University and BA in political science from Allegheny College.

Only 14.6 percent of Pennsylvania legislators are women and no women have served as governor or U.S. Senator. In the ten-county southwestern Pennsylvania region, which includes Allegheny County, only Mercer and Westmoreland counties have active women’s commissions. “Status of Women in the States,” published by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in 2004, noted that Pennsylvania ranked 47th in women’s political participation and representation and is the only state in which women are less likely than men to register to vote.

The Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy was originally established in 1998 as the Center for Women in Politics in Pennsylvania through the generosity of The Hillman Foundation, Inc and the Maurice Falk Medical Foundation. The Center provides programming on contemporary policy issues, promote political awareness, develop leadership skills for college and community women, encourage the development of networks, link curricular and co-curricular activities for students, and foster the application of knowledge to politics and policy.

The Center’s initiatives include:

Related Links

Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy

 

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