An all-female panel will moderate the November Democratic debate

For the first time this election cycle, the moderators for a Democratic primary debate will be all women, marking only the third time this has happened in US history.

The fifth Democratic debate, taking place on November 20 in Georgia, is set to be moderated by MSNBC anchors Rachel Maddow and Andrea Mitchell, NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker, and Washington Post White House reporter Ashley Parker. The panel will be hosted jointly by MSNBC and The Washington Post.

The slate of moderators is significant — there have only been two other primary debates with all-women panels, though individual women have also moderated general election debates, the New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum writes:

This will not be the first primary debate to feature a lineup of female moderators. In January 2016, Trish Regan and Sandra Smith moderated one of two Republican presidential debates on Fox Business Network. Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff of PBS teamed up for a Democratic debate in February 2016.

Only four women have been the sole moderator of a general election presidential debate: Pauline Frederick (1976), Barbara Walters (1976 and 1984), Carole Simpson (1992) and Candy Crowley (2012).

The debate stage for November is expected to be smaller than prior ones, given the Democratic National Committee’s stricter requirements for qualifying. In order to appear in the debate, candidates will have to hit 3 percent in four DNC-approved surveys or 5 percent in two early-state polls. Additionally, they need to raise money from at least 165,000 individual donors. Thus far, nine candidates have made the cut.

All four journalists who’ll be moderating focus on political coverage:

The Democratic National Committee has made a commitment to increasing the diversity of debate moderators this cycle and agreed to include at least one person of color and one woman in every debate.

Given how historically white and male the debate space has been, greater diversity among moderators has been a priority for advocacy groups, including NARAL, Emily’s List, and Color of Change.

In an open letter this spring, the groups urged media outlets and other organizations to ensure that at least 50 percent of the moderators running the debates would be women and at least 50 percent would be people of color. UltraViolet, an organization dedicated to gender equity, spearheaded the letter, which also called out sexism in political media coverage writ large.

Thus far, the DNC has lived up to its pledge.

During the June debates in Miami, four of the five moderators involved were women or people of color and just one was a white man. During the July debates in Detroit, the moderators included an African American reporter and a woman. During the September debates in Houston, two moderators were people of color and one was a woman. And during the October debate in Otterbein, Ohio, one moderator was a person of color and one was a woman.

November’s debate will continue that trend: Of the four moderators, one is a person of color and all are women.