Beyond 'First': How Nancy Pelosi Built a Pipeline of Women Leaders

Rep. Nancy Pelosi's announcement that she will not seek reelection in 2026 has prompted the familiar retrospectives: she was the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House and she led passage of major legislation. But reducing her legacy to a single symbolic milestone misses a more consequential achievement: she helped build an institutional pipeline that brought unprecedented numbers of women into elected office.

Why the pipeline matters

Research shows that women face distinctive obstacles when considering runs for office: voter stereotypes about gender and competence, perceived qualification gaps, entrenched male incumbency that limits turnover, and restricted access to party networks and donors. Visibility and normative change are powerful counters to those barriers. When voters regularly see women governing effectively, and when prospective candidates see role models who look like them, political ambition becomes more attainable.

How Pelosi used institutional power

The speakership is the most powerful role in Congress when a party backs its leader. Pelosi leveraged that party-level authority to shape committee assignments, set the legislative agenda, negotiate major bills and — crucially — recruit and finance candidates. She prioritized elevating Democratic women into visible leadership roles and used House Democratic infrastructure to mentor, fund and promote women candidates from local races to higher office.

Ripples across parties and levels of government

Pelosi's approach created a playbook: deliberate recruitment, targeted fundraising and mentorship can change who runs and who wins. State parties, civic groups and donor networks took notice. That model eventually influenced Republican recruitment strategies as well. When Elise Stefanik arrived in Congress in 2015, women held roughly 16 percent of House seats and Republican women made up about 5 percent of the chamber. Republican recruitment efforts like E-PAC helped increase the number of women in the House in later cycles — illustrating how an institutional expectation of women candidates can spread beyond one party.

A cultural shift with measurable effects

Today, women account for about 45 percent of House Democrats, a dramatic change from when Pelosi entered Congress in 1987 and there were just 25 women in the House. The cultural and institutional shifts she helped foster mean women are increasingly seen as competent leaders rather than tokens. That normalization has expanded across both parties and through local, state and federal offices: governors, state legislators and mayors who entered politics in recent decades often did so in an environment where the expectation that women belong in leadership is stronger.

Pelosi will rightly be remembered as the first woman Speaker of the House. Her deeper and more durable legacy, however, is structural: she helped create the systems and norms that recruit, support and elevate women candidates. Many of today's female officeholders may take that progress for granted — which is precisely the point.

Samantha Pettey, Ph.D. is a professor of political science at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.