Why do so few women occupy elected offices in the United States? One reason, perhaps the most important one, is that fewer women than men are politically ambitious. That is the major conclusion to emerge from the innovative research conducted by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox. This finding alone is bound to make It Takes a Candidate a must-read, must-cite book for all scholars studying gender and politics.
The analyses and narrative structure of the book are framed by two complementary frameworks. First is their conception of the “winnowing process,” which has three discrete stages: First, women and men must find their way into the pool of those qualified to seek public office. Second, among those in the qualified pool, a smaller number are politically ambitious and have considered running for office. Third, actual candidates represent a small fraction of the politically ambitious. By showing steadily increasing gender imbalances after each of the latter two stages, Lawless and Fox clearly describe how men come to outnumber women as candidates.
The authors also employ an explanatory framework that focuses on three key aspects of contemporary U.S. culture. First, they point to the persistence of “traditional” family roles in the daily lives of men and women in the eligibility pool. For example, for professional women who also bear the majority of child-rearing and household responsibilities, elective office represents the equivalent of the third job—a burden shared by few men. Second, they point to a “masculinized ethos” that results in discrimination (women are less likely to be encouraged or recruited to run for office). Third, they describe a “gendered psyche,” which both appears to have a realistic component (women understand that they must be more qualified than comparable men in order to be taken seriously) and is based on misperception (even when they have the same credentials, women rate themselves as less qualified than men do).
These explanations are summarized in Chapter 1 and developed in more detail in the relevant substantive chapters. The authors do an excellent job in explaining the mechanisms, showing how they rest upon extensive literatures in both political science and in gender studies more generally. The mechanisms are illustrated with apt, often colorful, anecdotes from the experiences of political elites and from qualitative accounts provided by the respondents.
The winnowing analysis and the explanatory frameworks are brought together in order to analyze data from the authors' Citizen Political Ambition Study. This impressive project is based on interviews with roughly 1,900 men and 1,900 women who, by virtue of their political activism or their positions in three “pipeline” professions (law, business, and education), comprise a sample of potential candidates for elective office. Two hundred women and men were selected for qualitative follow-up interviews. The male and female samples are virtually identical in terms of their education, income, race, and ethnicity. Each potential candidate completed a questionnaire that asked whether he or she had ever considered running for elective office. While an impressive 43% of the women answered affirmatively, this number is dwarfed by the 59% of men who had seriously considered such a run: a gender gap of 16 points.
Of those who considered running, 20% of the men and 15% of the women report having actually run for office. The big gap in consideration (the first step in their overall model) combines with the more modest gap in actually running (the second step) so that even if women were equally represented in the pipeline professions, we expect a two-to-one ratio of male-to-female candidates. Thus, most of the observed disparity in substantive representation in U.S. governments can be attributed to the fact that few women think of themselves as potential candidates.
Chapters 4–7 examine both quantitative survey data and answers from 200 follow-up interviews. A total of 24 statistical tables help us to understand the gender gap in political ambition from various angles. Readers should read these substantive chapters very closely for two reasons. First, the tables and in-depth interviews reveal many interesting patterns that will resonate with the three basic explanations put forward by the authors and with conventional understandings of patriarchy in the contemporary United States. The explanations “ring true” and the writing is engaging. Second, there is often a looseness to the analysis that sometimes leads the authors to make assertions that go beyond or even contradict their own data.
For example, on page 55, Lawless and Fox note that women were 3% more likely than men to speak with their parents about politics, 8% less likely to be encouraged to seek office by their parents, and 3% more likely to have parents who actually ran for office. I would call that a wash. But from these (and perhaps other, unreported) findings, the authors conclude that the data “make clear” that “women were less likely than men to grow up in highly politicized homes” (p. 58). This unfortunate conclusion is repeated several times, including in the summary table in the final chapter.
The biggest disconnect, however, occurs in the interpretation of comprehensive models predicting political ambition. In these models, the dependent variable is whether individuals in the eligibility pool ever considered running for office. Independent variables include sex, demographic and socioeconomic status measures, measures of political interest and engagement, plus variables intended to operationalize aspects of traditional family roles, gendered psyche, or masculinized ethos.
If some combination of these explanations accounts for the gender gap in political ambition, the coefficient for “sex” should shrink to zero and statistical insignificance. Recall that there was a 16 point gap in political ambition initially. I was therefore surprised to see that when the authors controlled for the differential recruitment of men and women (Table 5.8), the estimated gender gap does not shrink. Yes, women are less likely to be recruited; and, yes, recruitment has an enormous effect on political ambition. But the authors' analyses show that this does not account for the gender gap in ambition at all. Similarly, the authors show that women tend to undervalue their qualifications, and show that self-reported qualifications are related to ambition. But their analyses (Table 6.4 and Figure 6.1) show that if women evaluated themselves exactly as men do, the gender gap would still be about 15 points.
Thus, when the authors say on page 127 that “the results we presented in Chapters 3–6 offer substantial leverage not only in predicting whether a respondent has considered running for office, but also in accounting for much of the gender gap in political ambition,” they are contradicting the findings they report in numerous logistic regression tables. The “truth” is undoubtedly more complex, and a solution to these statistical paradoxes may lie in the authors' data. But the paradox is a glaring one, and makes several key conclusions problematic.
The loose connection between sections of the narrative and the reported data analysis mar what is otherwise an outstanding, agenda-setting contribution. The authors have revealed a major gap in our understanding of gender and substantive representation and suggest that much of the problem lies in self-perceptions that are not easily changed. I recommend that all gender scholars read this book—but read it carefully.
