Northern Wyoming News - Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years

When Debbie Hammons was first elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives in 2005, a reporter asked her how it felt to be a minority. She replied, "Which minority are you talking about? Being a woman or being a Democrat or being from the Big Horn Basin?"

Hammons was born in 1950 and raised on a Worland, Wyoming ranch. She attended school before Title IX, and as an ambitious young girl, found there were walls in place to prevent her from competing. The boys that she played with every recess at South Side Elementary were suddenly out of her league when she reached sixth grade. "I went running out to the basketball court in sixth grade, and the boys said, 'Girls don't play basketball.' And so, that was my career in sports. I became a cheerleader," Hammons said.

Title IX, prohibiting discrimination based on gender in any educational program receiving federal funding, was enacted in 1972. It turned 50 years old on June 23 of last year. According to the Women's Sports Foundation's 2022 report, girls now have 3 million additional high school sports opportunities than before Title IX. However, high school women still receive 1 million less sports opportunities than their male peers and the gender gap persists despite progress.

The President's Fitness Test started in 1966, and Hammons remembered doing the 600-yard dash. "You had to run in circles for a long time, and people felt like they were going to throw up and were feeling terrible. Well, Kate Faure lapped us all! I remember her just running so easily. And she looked back, and she was embarrassed that she was so much faster than the rest of us."

Faure's younger sisters, Francie and Mary, went on to be inducted into the Worland High School Hall of Fame after Title IX for their decorated sports careers.

"You know that the irony is that the other girls who became cheerleaders, were fantastic athletes. And I know my class, we had some really tall girls who were just athletically gifted. If we had girls sports - I of course, would have done it, I'm very competitive - I think we would have been state champions," Hammons said.

Hammons, who resides in Colorado now, graduated from Worland High School in 1969. She attended Stanford University and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and creative writing. After about 10 years away from Worland, her father asked her to come home and take over the ranch. Hammons credits his respect for her opinion, in her future endeavors to express that opinion.

"I think that's where it starts. Do you grow up in a household where you, as a girl, are asked, 'Well, what do you think?'" Hammons explained, noting that her father valuing her opinion made her feel safe to place herself in situations where she could speak out. She may not have been able to play sports in school, but Hammons was on the speech team. A career in education, community service and representation was sparked.

But after earning her teacher's certificate and student teaching in Worland, Hammons found she had difficulty getting hired at the school. "The superintendent at that time didn't believe that you should hire a husband and a wife teacher, that only the man would be the teacher but his wife wouldn't be hired," Hammons said. So, she started a career in television while she and her husband Greg Hammons raised their sons and became a successful producer and host for the PBS programs, "Main Street Wyoming," "Wyoming Voices" as well as 'Womankind."

"There were three others in town that were married teachers, and none of us could get hired. Eventually, that superintendent left and all of us ended up being hired at another time," Hammons said. When she did become a teacher, she taught at Worland Middle School, High School and Northwest College, producing television and writing for national publications in the space between.

Working in broadcast, then teaching in secondary education, Hammons was used to being a woman in a male-dominated field. She served on many boards through the years and remembered serving on a church council in her 20s, "I was frustrated, because I would come up with an idea and say it, and they just didn't hear me. And I found out if I whispered my ideas to whatever guy was sitting next to me, and they said it, everybody heard it."

Years later, serving on the University of Wyoming (UW) Board of Trustees, she was one of two women in the "good old boys club." In a particularly fruitful Cowboys football season, ESPN came to wine and dine the board. Hammons found out after her male counterparts told stories of their great night of entertainment, that she had been left home.

"I went and found the president of the University, and I said, 'That will not happen again while I am on the Board of Trustees.' So, it never did," Hammons laughed. "But that was the environment I came into." Hammons went on to serve on the board for 12 years. She was elected as the first female Board President since the 1920s. While there are five women on the Board of Trustees now, they have not had a female president again in the 20 years since Hammons served.

By 2005, Hammons was used to being a voice of representation for the minority. However, she was still tentative running as a female Democrat in a state largely represented by Republican men. Hammons said that in the early 2000s, Worland was struggling to see growth, and its citizens were down in the doldrums. "I thought, 'I need to be willing to lose,'" Hammons explained. "'I'm going to speak up and do everything I can to help Worland and Washakie County thrive.'"

Washakie County was open to change, she found. As a state representative, Hammons was able to coauthor and cosponsor the Hathaway bill, which created a $400 million permanent endowment fund for the Hathaway Scholarship. Her voice was eventually heard, but Hammons says there is still room for improvement.

"There was not a room that I was in, that I didn't feel that my participation and my viewpoint changed the outcome. If you only have men in a room, you do not have the full spectrum of experience. And when you pass a law or create a policy, 50 percent of the people that it affects are women. So, it's only fair that they would be at the table in the in the designing of the law or the policy because it's going to affect them also," Hammons said.

In 2023, Wyoming's Legislature was 22.2 percent women, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Just across the state border, in Colorado, 53 percent of the Legislature is female, an arbitrary difference in opportunities for women, according to Hammons. The issues that Wyoming is facing – and that in turn, the Legislature is facing – may turn away women despite programs designed to keep young people working in the state, Hammons explained.

"I think some of the choices in front of the state right now will affect the state for a generation, because there will be a generation of young women who will choose not to live in Wyoming," Hammons said.

"It makes me sad that the population of Washakie County is the same as it was when I was a kid. And I just think so much of that has to do with - everybody needs a job and they want to live in a place where they feel like they can fly. People have to have meaningful work. And they have to be paid fairly."

"The Wage Gap in Wyoming in 2022: How Gender, Race and Ethnicity Affect Pay Equity," by UW economists Anne Alexander and Chian Jones Ritten shows that the wage gap in the Equality State persists. The report found that on average, women make 75 cents on the dollar compared to men in Wyoming. In Washakie County, it is only 67 cents to the dollar. At the same time, Wyoming women are becoming more educated than their male counterparts on average, with a slightly higher percentages of undergraduate degrees.

"The average working woman in Wyoming loses enough money during a year from the gender wage gap to buy a total of 108 more weeks of food, 12 more months of mortgage and utilities payments, 21 more months of rent or 8,402 additional gallons of gas," the report reads.

"We need to redefine what we think a leader looks like," Hammons ascertained. "We need to listen to each other. And to not assume that we know what the right thing to do is. These are very complex issues that we're dealing with in our society right now, and too many of us are just listening to single voices. And so what happened to live and let live and respecting your neighbor and helping each other? I just think that we all need to be more open to understand the other person's point of view.

"That is that the first step," Hammons laughed.