It Takes a Candidate explains why professional women aren't running for political office in sufficient numbers to narrow the persistent gender gap in political representation in the United States. By means of a comprehensive survey of men and women in the political “pipeline professions,” the authors discovered that women remain less politically ambitious than men. Even highly qualified women tend not to envision political careers or to believe they have the right stuff for politics. Remarkably, women who do decide to run for office often doubt their credentials. In contrast, men with similar qualifications have little difficulty imagining holding even the highest political positions, as they accept their life and work skills as unique training for elected public service.

Wait a minute, you're probably thinking. Doesn't this explanation individualize the problem, blame (and essentialize) women and let political parties and electoral systems off the hook? No, for two reasons. First, Lawless and Fox firmly reject rational choice approaches in favour of social constructionism, arguing that traditional gender binaries and patriarchal thinking intersect to inhibit women's political ambition. That women don't see themselves as qualified for politics is not their own fault; it is, rather, “often rooted in traditional family role orientations and a masculinized ethos, the consequence of which is the gendered psyche, whose imprint leaves women far less comfortable than men with the idea of pursuing public office” (96). Secondly, the study does not overlook demand factors such as party recruitment, incumbency and electoral opportunity.

Lawless and Fox administered a comprehensive questionnaire to 6,800 male and female members of the “candidate eligibility pool,” by means of random national samples of people in the four occupations most likely to yield political candidates, namely law, business, education and political activism. An impressive response rate of 60 per cent buttresses their claim to offer a thorough assessment of the relationship between gender and the decision-making processes that lead to political candidacy. The empirical findings are presented clearly and accessibly, and enriched with quotations from in-depth interviews with two hundred of the respondents. Indeed, the qualitative material supplements the survey data and offers a series of compelling narratives to guide the less quantitatively oriented reader through the reams of regression analyses. In short, It Takes a Candidate is rigorous and engaging. This book is a must for students of women and electoral politics, would serve as a superb text for an advanced course on the subject and will provide illuminating data and examples for lectures on women's candidacy in a junior-level gender and politics class.

What are Lawless and Fox's most intriguing findings? In a nutshell, women don't run for office because they aren't asked, and because they aren't convinced that they have the ability to run, win and do the job well. Women in the sample were less likely than men to experience a politicized upbringing, to be encouraged by their parents to run for office, and to be actively recruited by political parties. Women were more likely than the men in the sample to see their family roles as a barrier to public office and to “underestimate their qualifications to seek and win elective office” (96). The solution seems simple; women need to be encouraged to run for office by family, friends or, most importantly, party elites, and they need to be convinced that they are eminently qualified to succeed. Why isn't this happening? That party leaders are not recruiting highly skilled women suggests they don't think women are up to the task. A sexist double standard is also indicated by the qualitative findings on the impact of child rearing on women's candidacy.

This research project should be imported to Canada. While Lawless and Fox's key conceptual arguments about the gendered nature of political involvement and recruitment have already been made, by Brodie in 1985 (Women and Politics in Canada; Toronto, McGraw-Hill Ryerson), an investigation of the relative weight of supply and demand factors is long overdue. I urge researchers working in this area to design a project that builds upon Brodie's (1985) benchmark study of women's candidacy. Here's my proposal: the project should replicate Brodie's questionnaire with a survey of all women candidates, and a random sample of male candidates to achieve equivalent numbers, for provincial, territorial and national legislatures since 1971. As well, a comprehensive sample of men and women in the relevant “pools of eligibles,” to use Brodie's term, would allow researchers to understand if Canadian women are more likely than men to say “no” to political candidacy. Overall, this sort of mega-research project, while challenging and expensive, would provide rich fodder for comparisons across the sexes, between Canadian jurisdictions and with the United States.