August 2026
Every November, women show up. In every presidential election since 1980, women have registered and voted at higher rates than men, and in 2024, women turned out at 61 percent compared to 57.4 percent for men. That is 44 years of proof that women will participate fully when given a real seat at the table.
August also happens to land right in election season. Washington's primary is August 4, and by the time this issue reaches your desk, Idaho, Oregon, California, Montana, and Arizona will already have finished their primaries for the fall.
What is still ahead matters just as much: 36 governor's races nationwide, including California and Oregon, plus state legislature seats and a long list of local ballot measures on transportation funding, property taxes, and workforce housing.
I say this often in this column, and I will say it again: a county vote on truck routes or a state decision on lumber tariffs can move our bottom line faster than almost anything decided in Washington, D.C. Local involvement is not the undercard. For an industry like ours, it is usually the main event.
The wider business world is still catching up to the participation lesson women teach us every cycle. Women now own close to 42 percent of all businesses in the United States, 14.2 million of them, generating $2.8 trillion in receipts. But split that number and the gap shows up: women own 42.3 percent of nonemployer businesses, the solo operations without paid staff, and only 22.9 percent of employer businesses, the ones that hire and grow. Manufacturing tells a similar story. Women make up 28.4 percent of the manufacturing workforce today, and the industry will need roughly 800,000 more women by 2035 just to cover the coming wave of retirements.
Here is the good news for our members. The Western Pallet Association is not waiting around for national numbers to catch up. This past year, more than 45 women turned out for WPA's first dedicated women's luncheon at the annual conference, a strong first showing for an event that did not exist a year earlier. That is not a token gesture. It is the same pattern we see at the ballot box: give women a real invitation and a real reason to be in the room, and they show up.
That turnout is backed by actual seats, not just good intentions. Magali Melchor of M&J Pallet Recycling and Julie DeRoush of Tri-Pac N.A. both hold board seats. Two of WPA's standing committees are chaired by women: Beatrice Vasquez of Oxnard Pallet Company leads Outreach and Education, and I chair Advocacy and Insights. Those are not honorary titles. Committee chairs set agendas and board members vote on budgets and strategy. That is where participation turns into influence, locally and nationally alike.
This kind of change does not happen automatically, even in a friendly association. It happens because someone asks. Annie Montey of American Pallet Inc. attended her first WPA conference not long after finishing college and noticed the room was almost entirely English speaking, even though her own workday was often conducted in Spanish. She volunteered for the WPA board, and in 2019 the board agreed to offer Spanish translation devices at conference sessions. It is a small example with a bigger lesson: WPA listens when members ask for a better seat.
Araceli Rodriguez, president of Chicago Pallet Service, has watched a similar shift happen on the plant floor. Her operation now employs seven women in production roles, the most she has seen in 24 years there, which she credits partly to automation opening doors that used to require pure strength.
None of this means the work is finished, in our industry or in our politics. But WPA has a genuine head start, and it is worth naming so we can build on it. A luncheon with 45 women, two board seats, two committee chairs, and now an election season where every one of us has a reason to show up locally, not just nationally. Register, check your sample ballot for the local races, and show up in August and again in November. That is how participation gaps close, one seat and one vote at a time.
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