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. 

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.

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.

The Still Illusive Equality: A look at gender in the 2010 and 2011 Peruvian elections

By Anya Malkov, WAPPP summer intern
Originally posted August 18, 2012 

That is the name of the report I worked on this summer. Well, it's the translation of "Igualdad Esquiva Aún" which Google Translate provided. The more accurate name would be "The Still Illusive Equality: A look at gender in the 2010 and 2011 Peruvian elections," which a sequel to "Igualdad Esquiva"  published by IDEA and Transparencia after the 2006 elections.

In the process of writing a chapter for this report, I learned that despite a mandated quota that women comprise 30% of candidates on every party's list in every district, despite the fact that women actually comprised 40% of candidates overall, equality is indeed dodgy yet.

After the 2011 election, women made up 21.5% of Congress, which - mind you - is still more than in the US, but is significantly less than the 29% seen in the previous Congress. After the 2006 elections, activists were celebrating how close women were to hitting "critical mass" in Congress, and how they had been elected in more areas of the country, not just in the capital Lima...well, much of that waned in the latest election, leaving all of us scratching our heads, trying to figure out why.

We couldn't establish causation, but we did see some suggestive trends. My favorite finding was about incumbency and re-election. Favorite because I felt like an explorer, departing from the methodology of the previous report to investigate a hunch. Here is what I found out about incumbent male and female members of Congress running for re-election:

Blue - ran for re-election and lost, red - ran and won, green - didn't run.

Basically - majority of incumbent men run again, but majority of incumbent women do not. Caveat: I am only analyzing 2011, but a cursory look at other years shows similar trends.

It's also important to note that political parties have more control over who runs and who doesn't in Peru than in the US, so we would have to dig deeper to find out why the women aren't running for re-election. That would be a line of reasoning worth pursuing if we could establish that re-election is easier to win than a regular election. At first I though "Duh! Obviously it is!" but remembering that not all countries love their incumbents as much as we do in the US (incumbency rate squarely over 80%!).

So I whipped out my statistics training and crunched some numbers.

Turns out that in 2011, 44% of men who ran for re-election won, contrasted with 18% of men who ran from outside (most for the first time, some had served before). Ok, that's a nice incumbent advantage, but what about women?  47% of those who ran for re-election won, versus 6.6% of outsiders! That means incumbent women were more than 7 times more likely to be elected than non-incumbent women! Yes, it also means that non-incumbent men are almost three times more likely to be elected than non-incumbent women, but look, incumbent women are doing better than incumbent men...except that they don't run in nearly the same quantities...

Echoing my discovery, the author of another chapter showed that women running for both national and state-level office have less political experience than do the men. Not surprising, but taken together our findings point to a disturbing trend that despite the quotas the women aren't accumulating the political experience and the cache, because they leave politics faster. This raises the question WHY? which would, if answered, give us a hint to the question WHAT CAN BE DONE TO CHANGE IT?

And that also makes me think about the US and the female incumbents here...perhaps instead of watching "West Wing" I'll do a literature review today...Master's thesis anyone?

Women's political opportunities in Kenya

WAPPP faculty adviser, Jane Mansbridge's, work is cited in the East African article, "Wanjiku’s Parliament Part II: Why should women’s representation matter?" about the future of women's political opportunities in Kenya.

Both presence and numbers matter for another critically important reason: Having significant numbers of women in parliament sends a loud and clear signal to all citizens that women have a proper place in the halls of power. This is particularly important when battling historically entrenched ideas. As democratic theorist Jane Mansbridge points out, this signalling effect goes far beyond mere symbolism. In societies where women have been historically excluded from the franchise (as in Kenya during colonial times), and then excluded from positions of responsibility (as in Kenya today), bringing women’s representation above the “critical mass” threshold makes it unambiguous that women can no longer be treated as second-class citizens.

Should feminists back Michele Bachmann? (The Guardian)

This Gaurdian article, 'Should feminists back Michele Bachmann,' draws from WAPPP faculty adviser Jane Mansbridge's work to look at the impact of Bachmann's candidacy. The author writes:

Bachmann's politics may make her an undesirable standard-bearer for feminist principles, but if her presence in the race means greater female participation in politics, should women back Bachmann?

The answer must be a contingent yes. Feminist philosopher and Harvard professor Jane Mansbridge explored in a 1999 article the question of whether blacks should represent blacks and women represent women. She argued that "descriptive representation", or representation by people who, in some way, look and sound like their voter base, is good in certain contexts.

There are two particular implications from Mansbridge's research that should make us pause before throwing Bachmann out with the bathwater.

First, there are occasions in democracy that lend themselves to descriptive representation. Descriptive representatives can, according to Mansbridge, communicate to their voter base in a way others cannot. They also force us to deliberate on issues specific to their identity as a representative.

Second, descriptive representation can potentially recast underrepresented groups as "capable of ruling". Whatever Bachmann's politics, her presence as a serious presidential contender helps American society see women as potential political leaders. This, in turn, enhances the democratic legitimacy of a group historically excluded from high office – women.

Full article: 'Should feminists back Michele Bachmann', The Guardian, August 25, 2011

Victoria Budson Elected Chair of the Mass. Commission on the Status of Women

Victoria A. Budson

Congratulations to WAPPP Executive Director, Victoria Budson on her election to Chair the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women!
Full article

“I am pleased to have the opportunity to strengthen the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by improving the equality and status of women,” said Budson. “I look forward to working with the members of the Commission, the local and regional commissions throughout the state, Governor Patrick and the Legislature to lead us toward the realization of gender equality.”