It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office

by Jennifer L. Lawless, Richard L. Fox

This important work constitutes a systematic, nationwide empirical account of the effects of gender on political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition Study, a national survey of 3,800 "potential candidates" conducted by the authors, it relates these findings: --Women, even at the highest levels of professional accomplishment, are significantly less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to run for elective office. --Women are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. --Women are less likely than men to consider themselves "qualified" to run for office. --Women are less likely than men to express a willingness to run for a future office. According to the authors, this gender gap in political ambition persists across generations, despite contemporary society's changing attitudes towards female candidates. While other treatments of gender in the electoral process focus on candidates and office holders, It Takes a Candidate makes a unique contribution to political studies by focusing on the earlier stages of the candidate emergence process and on how gender affects the decision to seek elective office.

Genres: Nonfiction, School, Politics, Read For School

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 29, 2001

Reviews

[Amber Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sometimes worry that I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.

[Annie Jarman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Main points:
- It is misleading to look at gender parity in the electoral candidate pool without considering whether well-positioned women and men are equally interested and willing to run for office.
- Objectively speaking women in this sample of the candidate eligibility pool are just as qualified as men to hold elective positions, yet they are twice as likely as men to believe they are not qualified, and half as likely to think they would win (see page 116 - 117)
- Women have higher expectations for what it means to be qualified, a lot of men think of qualification as just being the desire to serve and to be tough. Women think they need to do all the learning before they try to get there - list impossible requirements like knowing everything about public policy.
- The gender gap in self-perceived qualifications serves as the most potent explanation we uncover for the gender gaps in political ambition.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book and study. Looks at women in a position to run for office (based on past history of officeholders) and determines the reasons they are less likely to run than their male counterparts.

Lawless is doing a new book that will be released soon and I'm interested to see how that will add to this one.

Questions this book left me with:
1. What about the women who never made it to the stage of being optimal candidates and, thus, never made it to the survey pool?
2. How can you recall influences in hindsight so accurately?