For the first time in the city’s history, New Yorkers elected a City Council with a majority of seats (31 out of 51) occupied by women.
The new Council, which is also a historically diverse group, is the result of several factors: the pandemic’s devastation of working-class communities of color; the city’s matching-funds program, which gives candidates $8 for every $1 they raise from any city resident, amplifying the effect of small donations; and the new ranked-choice voting system, which encouraged more candidates to run in party primaries and gave average New Yorkers more influence over who wins.
On December 8, right after new-member orientation at City Hall, the women noticed that while the men’s bathroom is inside the Council chambers, the women’s is outside. “I said, ‘We should just put a sign on it and call it a gender-neutral bathroom,’” says Sandy Nurse, 37, a Panama-born carpenter and community activist representing Brooklyn’s 37th District. “And we’ll just take it over.” It will start there, with “simple things,” she says. And eventually, “we’re going to do things that the city hasn’t seen before.”
https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/nyc-city-council-women.html?fbclid=IwAR2BS57G8tpiYXjkvsGU4UeimOPMYli9Bu-ZPTHsQgqAsSymXZ56--JyaIQ
