Review | It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office by Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox
by Jane Mansbridge on April 15, 2009 in Features
On March 19, 2008, Assistant Professor of Brown University Jennifer Lawless visited the Kennedy School to discuss her 2005 book, It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office . It is, in my opinion, the most interesting book on women and politics in the United States in a decade. It has huge implications for women outside the United States as well.
Lawless and Fox expended significant effort – unimagined and almost unimaginable until they tried it – of creating a sample of individuals who might run for office (in contrast with other studies, which base their findings on individuals who have already run for office). They obtained professional lists for the four main feeder professions in the United States – law, business, education, and political activism – and created a matched sample of women and men in each profession; i.e. all external indicators of success for women and men were the same. They sent a questionnaire to the sample and interviewed a subset in-depth.
The authors found that while women who run for office are as likely to win and raise the same amount of money as men, they are far less likely to have a spouse or partner who is responsible for most household tasks or childcare.
Women, moreover, are less likely to be encouraged to run for office, whether by family, friends, party officials or activists, and feel less confident of their qualifications for office. More than men, they expect political races to be highly competitive and weigh the costs of a campaign more heavily. They are more likely than men to say, “I don’t have a thick enough skin” to run, and believe it is harder to campaign and raise money.
For these reasons, women in the matched sample were less likely to consider running for office, and of those who considered it, less likely to run. The quantitative data presented by Lawless and Fox are devastating and the responses to their interviews searing.
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