Training the next generation of political leaders

HKS students in Oval Office training session.

Here at the Women and Public Policy Program, we are dedicated to closing gender gaps in economic opportunity, health, education and political participation. Research shows us that women are far less likely to run for office than equally qualified men, even though when they run, they win just as often and change social norms around gender. That’s why WAPPP, supported by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, offers the “From Harvard Square to the Oval Office” program every year targeted to female graduate students aspiring to hold political office.

Refinery 29, in partnership with We Are the XX, created a video that explains how women are changing the political scene – and public policy priorities – in the City of Boston. It features Boston City Councilor and Oval Office Alumna Michelle Wu as well as Councilor-Elect Andrea Campbell. Both women discuss the unlikely paths that brought them to politics and share advice for young women considering public office. Adrienne Kimmell, Executive Director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, is also interviewed in the video about the barriers for women in Massachusetts politics.

For more on how women in political leadership help to narrow the gender gap, visit the Political Representation section of WAPPP's Gender Action Portal. 

Are Women Punished for Seeking Power?

One of the catch-22s of gender relations these days is that women are hemmed by both realistic power structures that do exist, as well as by perceptions of what ‘should’ exist.

Specifically regarding gender stereotypes, many people expect not only that women are more modest in their presentation and interactions, but that they should be more modest.

So what happens when women violate these stereotypes?

That was the question that Professor Victoria Briscoll of Yale University posed in her seminar on “Women and Power: Hard to Earn, Difficult to Signal, and Easy to Lose.” She broke her answer into three parts.

First, women often have to manage people’s impressions of their rise to power. Their intention of seeking power and authority appear inconsistent with people’s perceptions that women should be communal and not dominating. So even female politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Patty Murray, who are essentially in the business of power, often downplay the fact that they are there, insisting that they “never expected to run for office.”

Second, once in power, men and women often communicate differently to continue this impression management. According to a great deal of social psychological research, ‘powerful’ people are often given a license to talk more than people with less power, who signal deference. Moreover, women tend to lead in more democratic, non-hierarchical fashions than men. So in spaces like the US Senate floor, men talk to display power, while women tend to talk to establish and maintain relationships and advocate for communal rather than personal causes. This is often in the effort to avoid backlash.



Finally, women’s power is often more fragile and easily lost than that of men. In the case of expressing anger, women are almost always penalized for this, while angry white men are sometimes rewarded for being assertive. But when women can explain their anger away to an external source, women are rewarded.

So clearly there’s a lot of work for society to do. To get there, do women need to keep on adjusting what they do? How can we get societal expectations to change in the long run?

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More Women Can Run (and should)

A few months ago, we looked at some of the hurdles that women face when running for elected office. In this week’s seminar, however, Kira Sanbonmatsu of Rutgers University discussed her new book with Susan Carroll on how, in fact, More Women Can Run.

It’s a strange paradox that on many counts, women are more politically involved than men---since 1980s, they’ve voted at a higher rate, for example---but still comprise less than ¼ of most state legislatures and less than 18% of the US Congress.

Sanbonmatsu and Carroll surveyed a number of successful female candidates for state legislature around the country for their views on electoral success. In spite of enduring impediments like male incumbency bias and the fact that women are often socialized to behave in certain ways, results from the survey provided three important reasons why and how the decision to run can be made easier for women.

First, successful female officials provided a vast array of answers on the qualifications necessary to run for office. Some said education and personability were vital, others suggested engagement with the community, still others said an enduring electoral base or fundraising ability was the key to success. The conclusion is that there are, in fact, no specific qualifications for electoral success, and successful women come from a wide diversity of backgrounds. Many more women are in fact qualified than realize it.

Second, the decision to run is often more related to a woman’s relationships and networks---certainly more so than for men. For example, a woman is more likely to run for office if a political party leader, spouse, or organization encourages her to do so, than she would be on her own volition. While this relational dependency seems like a barrier, it also means that women’s initial tendencies against running can be changed with a little encouragement; that their initial socialization can be nudged. Increasing women’s representation, then, might just be accomplished with some effective recruitment.

Lastly, some of the current gender disparity, in particular the fact that women’s representation in state legislatures has plateaued in recent years, has more to do with party composition than the role of women per se. While Democratic women hold 32.3% of their party's seats in state legislatures, Republican women hold 16.5%. Today, women are better represented as Democratic state legislators. Changes in partisan politics, then, have had consequences for overall representation of women. According to Sanbonmatsu, this should not be understood as a loss for women generally, but an opportunity for each party to include more women, both parties recruit more female candidates, particularly women of color.

Despite some of the other hurdles, more women can run with more ease than they think---and considering some of the benefits of having women represented, should.

Make the Road by Running: Why don’t women want to run for office?

Needless to say, women are severely underrepresented in elected office in the United States. Only 17% of the federal House of Representatives, 20% of the US Senate, 10% of state governors, 26% of state legislators, and 12% of big-city City Halls are women. Ninety-five countries surpass the US in women’s representation in national legislatures---and America’s actually been slipping further in the last few years.

This is definitely due to some of the common culprits, like media bias against women, the fact that women have less experience in feeder professions like corporate leadership and government---though this is changing slowly---and voter preference for those incumbents (men) who have already been in office, to say nothing of pure sexism.

 

Women of the US Senate

But, according to Jennifer Lawless, Professor of Government at American University and one of the country’s leading experts on women’s political participation, the main reason for the underrepresentation of women in politics is a lack of political ambition.

In this week’s WAPPP seminar on “Uncovering the Origins of the Gender Gap in Political Ambition,” Professor Lawless discussed how early socialization affects people’s political views: if girls are raised in a very politically active family that discusses politics and exposes them to those ideas, they’re more likely to be interested in getting involved. But in a national sample of young people, political ambition begins to stratify just as early, with women saying they would rather be business owners or teachers before they would even consider running for local office.

This stratification, however, gets even worse in college: by then, men are not only more competitive, self-confident, and perceived to be culturally “appropriate” for political leadership, but they get more involved in political activities by that age.

Why don’t women? Is it because of the specific responsibilities in elected office, or all the painful political mudslinging people have to suffer in order to get there?

According to those same surveys, women are equally likely to want to improve their communities. They’re just not sure if public office is the right way to do it.

But having more women in elected office is not just equitable, but produces better policy and political outcomes. In the recent US Federal government shutdown, as one Huffington Post article put it, “Men Got Us Into The Shutdown, Women Got Us Out”--referring to a bipartisan group of female Senators who broke the impasse by committing to negotiation.

So how do we encourage greater female political ambition? The Democratic National Committee’s quota of reserving 50% of their delegations for women hasn’t produced the outcomes we’ve sought.

Professor Lawless offered some excellent advice from her own unsuccessful campaign for US Congress in Rhode Island. She confessed that, though her candidacy was made much easier by the fact that she didn’t have to juggle a regular career, family, and a public political life simultaneously (as many other women do), the path was nonetheless fraught with discrimination and emotional frustration. But the experience of running is itself empowering; gender stereotyping is a self-fulfilling prophecy that can only be undone when more and more women realize that it gets better. Having women set their own ambitions higher and working towards them paves a smoother path for others.

Women can only make the road by running.



Photo source.

How Does Media Bias Affect People's Perceptions?

In December 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was meeting with the press in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She had just spoken about the challenges of being female in legal practice, where women are often judged on more critical and superficial standards than are men.

A few minutes later, the moderator asked, with no irony, “so which [clothing] designers do you prefer?” The Secretary responded, “Would you ever ask a man that question?” before moving to the next question.

Media coverage of female politicians---with a focus on appearance, on “women’s issues” like education rather than economics, on communal rather than individual qualities---is clearly different than that of men. This week’s WAPPP Seminar speaker, Exploring Viewer Reactions to Media Coverage of Female Politicians, Joanna Everitt, a Dean at the University of New Brunswick and current WAPPP Visiting Fellow, explored the effects of that coverage on voter perceptions.

She starts with the assumption that, in many cases, media simply reflects cultural biases and stereotypes---rather than actually creating them. One of these is that politics is what men do; for women, playing that ‘power game’ is out of the ordinary.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm (2003–2011) speaking at 2012 DNC.

Professor Everitt and her colleagues broke down even visual cues into those that represent decisiveness and individual power---like up-and-down vertical hand motions---and those that represent communal inclusiveness---like horizontal hand gestures. (I bet you’re moving your hands right now; if not, try it. You’ll see what she means---plus it’s been confirmed by repeated social psychological tests).

The media even more subtly reflects some of these biases in how they present female candidates in short clips. Professor Everitt’s study played short videos of different politicians using ‘agentic’ versus ‘inclusive’ poses in front of 100 human lab rats (students that took part in surveys).

The result? There were no differences in whether the participants liked the candidates overall. But those male politicians that were shown using the up and down hand gesture were seen as more impressive, while those going side to side were less so. Female politicians were seen as more impressive and likable when they didn’t use expansive gestures and were actually less liked when they used the up and down hand gestures.

So what does that say about us as people? Sometimes women and men (of different races) succeed by ‘mastering’ and using some of the benefits of their own stereotypes. But is that good? Should we understand and master what is accepted---in a sort of social jiu-jitsu to get our work done? Or should we fight to effectively change what’s accepted? If so, how?

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Young Women in Congress: Kyrsten Sinema

As soon as she walked into the Newly Elected Members of Congress Conference at Harvard, Congresswoman-elect Kyrsten Sinema lit up the room with her personality – exchanging greetings with her colleagues like they were old friends, meeting Kennedy School staff and students with genuine interest. It was refreshing to see this dynamic young woman, stylish and hip, in a room dominated by suits, grays,  khakis and blues. Her personal style reflected and amplified this energy – a splash of color rivaled only by Congressman-elect Joe Kennedy’s bright red hair.

Before I get in trouble with fellow feminist bloggers for focusing on looks – I was impressed above all by Congresswoman Sinema’s seriousness of purpose and sharp political sense. Her relentless commitment to her constituents was evident and her energy contagious.

Below is a recreation of our conversation based on my notes.

When did you know you would run for office?

I was a social worker, and I saw that the system was not set up for these kids to succeed. So I figured if I just go down to the state legislature and tell them what needs to be done to fix it, they would fix it. So I did that, and they all thought it was so cute…and they didn’t do anything. That’s when I said, ‘you know what, I will take your job and do it better’. That’s when I decided to run.

What was most challenging about the congressional campaign?

Everything! It was a tight race that turned nasty with lots of outside money. The worst was hearing terrible things said about me on TV, knowing they weren’t true, but not having any recourse. I just had to keep on telling my story.

What (if anything) was easier than you expected?

I am lucky – I grew up in Arizona and I had been a community organizer for years, so I know the people in my district. What was amazing is that when I asked people for help, they came out in droves and helped. It was inspiring.

Did your community organizing experience translate into your campaign?

Oh, it’s the same thing! Community organizing is all about getting people to come together and be part of solving a problem, which is what campaigns are supposed to be, right? When people truly are invested and feel that they are part of the solution, that’s very powerful.

Advice to young women thinking about running for office?

If someone tells you that you can’t do something – ignore them. Look, I’m young, a woman, openly bisexual, not a member of a faith community, so yes, some people were telling me I shouldn’t run, that I couldn’t win, but I did. 

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.