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.



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Obama and America's Political Future...and Women!

Theda Skocpol is a rock star of the political science world. Her lecture on “Obama and America’s Political Future” drew a crowd to the WAPPP Cason Seminar room. I have never seen so many men at a WAPPP lunch before. Something tells me it’s because the topic was not gender this time...And yet, here are the top five women-related highlights from the conversation:

5. Women are a politically relevant demographic. In case you were wondering why both presidential campaigns are aggressively pursuing women, it is because women vote in higher numbers than men do. They trend Democratic. When they vote, they tend to be more aware of how policies may affect their families. 

4. The Tea Party is teeming with women – older white women, given the demographics of this movement. Professor Skocpol, who co-authored the first in-depth book on the Tea Party, said that the women were the lifeblood of the local chapters. They organized the meetings, brought the snacks and shouldered most of the work of the grassroots movement, but they stopped there. “Just like in every other movement” Professor Skocpol reflected “the women did not advance to the top or become candidates.”

3. Women in Election 2012: Issues and Voters is currently highlighted on the Scholars Strategy Network website. The SSN, which Professor Skocpol directs, brings together America’s leading scholars to address important public policy problems in language that anyone can understand. 

2. Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate challenger from Massachusetts, might benefit from the high number of educated female voters in the state. However, Professor Skocpol said Massachusetts is a historically difficult place for a woman to win. To illustrate the surprising ways that sexism manifests here, she described recent behavior of incumbent Senator Brown’s staffers at a Warren rally as “reminiscent of teenage boys trying to annoy their teacher.”  

1. “Hillary Clinton is going to run for President. And win.” Answering the question “Do you think Hillary Clinton might consider running?”

I should mention that in the best tradition of effective lecturing, Professor Skocpol also took us through the challenges the Obama administration has faced, dissected the failures of the administration to address some of those challenges, and explained the Tea Party practice of “kick-ass politics.”  She covered much more ground than I could possibly fit here, and even left us with some things to ponder for 2016.