Why Don’t More Women Run for Public Office?

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/09/15/why-dont-more-women-run-for-public-office/

by James Parks, Sep 15, 2007

Even though women make up the majority of all voters—54 percent in 2004—and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is one of the leading contenders for president in 2008, the number of women in elected office is still very low.

In a new Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, Jennifer Lawless, a political science professor at Brown University, says this gender gap will continue to deprive the public of some highly qualified candidates unless we act to change it.

Lawless, author of It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office and a 2006 candidate for Congress from Rhode Island, shares her experiences as a woman candidate in a state with a poor history of electing women. She explores the issue of “political ambition, why men have it, and why women don’t.”

Click here to read the entire Point of View column: http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/jennifer_lawless.cfm

While the number of women in Congress has grown by 800 percent since World War II, the United States ranks 82nd worldwide in the percentage of women in our national legislature. Only 16 percent of the members of the U.S. House and Senate are female. Women serve as governors in only nine states—Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan and Washington. And just 20 percent of big city mayors are female.

The “prospects for women’s full inclusion in our political system…are looking increasingly bleak,” Lawless says. A recent national study of college students found that men are nearly twice as likely as women to say they might be interested in running for office at some point in the future. Voter bias against women candidates also appears to be on the rise, she adds. Nearly one in every four Americans agrees that “most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.”

Lawless says she has found three basic barriers women face in seeking elected office:

* Family roles. Female candidates face a “double bind” that men rarely need to reconcile. Unlike male office seekers, women usually have to answer for the conduct of their children and spouses. At the same time, in families where both adults are working, generally in high-level careers, women are much more likely than men to be responsible for the majority of household tasks and handle the majority of child care responsibilities, Lawless says.
* Perceptions of qualifications. According to Lawless’ research, 60 percent of men, but less than 40 percent of women with the exact same credentials and qualifications, think they’re qualified to run for office. Not only do these women think that they’re not qualified to run, but they also are more likely to let their doubts hold them back.
* Recruitment efforts. The large majority of women who are well-positioned to seek office are significantly less likely than men to report being asked to run.

FULL story at link.