This post is one of a series of posts in observance of Women’s History Month.

Women started filling senior campaign ranks decades ago. Susan Estrich became the first female campaign manager of the modern era in 1988 for Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. Estrich claims another first as the first woman to be elected as president of the Harvard Law Review. In an interesting footnote, she got the job after campaign manager and Dukakis’ friend John Sasso was forced to resign, accused of leaking tapes to the media about fellow candidate Joe Biden’s plagiarism of a speech by British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock. Biden pulled out of the race soon afterward.

Women have run the campaigns of Al Gore, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Kellyanne Conway became the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign with Donald Trump. Prior to the campaign, Conway, a pollster and lawyer, worked occasionally with Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. Together they wrote What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live, published in 2010.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, is the second woman to have managed a winning presidential campaign, and the first woman to have done so for a Democratic candidate. In 2012, she was deputy manager of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. There are now many senior women in the pipeline in different aspects of campaigns who will make the transition to running a presidential campaign.

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