DENVER -- Gail Schoettler lost the election to be Colorado’s governor by 7,700 votes back in 1998. Since then, no other woman has run for the position until this year.
“I think it’s just much more difficult for women to run,” Schoettler told Anne Trujillo’s on this week’s Politics Unplugged. “Women would say to me, ‘I don’t think a woman can be a governor.’ They’d be more likely to vote for a woman for the senate but not the governor. They would say ‘I can’t vote for a woman. This is a man’s job.’”
Schoettler has spent much of the past 20 years helping get other women into office in Colorado, across the U.S. and around the world.
"We want women to have access to the halls of power, we want women to have influence and we want women to win,” Schoettler said. “When women are supporting women then women start to win.”
Schoettler says running for office is about more than raising money – it’s about self-confidence.
“I love watching young women now, they are so much more self-confident now than women of my generation were,” Schoettler said. “I hope we helped to lead the way, but they will stand up now and say, ‘of course I can do this.’ And I say, ‘of course you can and here are some of the things you can do to be successful.’”
Schoettler is a 2018 inductee into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.
Politics Unplugged airs Sundays at 4:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Denver7.