Why more women aren't elected

“Alas” reader Steven Duncan has been bringing up the “why don’t women just vote in female candidates?” question in the comments to an earlier post.

I don’t have time to write an answer today; but fortunately, I don’t have to. I can just recycle the answer I wrote to someone else, asking the same (or at least, a quite similar) question.

Several years ago, someone using the netname “RightWinger” wrote:

First of all, the answer seems to assume that – even if all women, without even a minority of exceptions, would prefer 50-50 female/male representatives (which seems unlikely) – they care so much about this one issue that they’re willing to ignore all their other opinions. I doubt this is true.

Next, studies have shown that, at least in the 90s (and in the USA ? in fact, all the data I refer to when I write is from the USA, sorry), female candidates do as well as male candidates with the voters. (In the 80s, many voters did seem to prefer men; female candidates had to be better money-raisers and have more experience to do as well as male candidates, on average).

But (at least in the USA) who gets to be on the ballot isn’t something that’s generally chosen by the voters. Realistically, someone who doesn’t have the support of some party elites (as well as the support of at least a few people with VERY deep wallets) has next to zilch chance of winning the nomination for a national office in either major party. (And if you’re not in a major party in the USA, then you’re simply not gonna get in office).

Party elites are usually “old boy” networks, and they can be quite sexist. For instance, a 1998 survey by David Niven of county party chairs found that male party chairs (the vast majority) were of the opinion that women are less likely to be able to win elections than men — even though statistics show that in the 1990s, the voters haven’t been giving one sex or the other an advantage in elections. But right or wrong, party chairs will always favor whichever candidates they believe has the best chance of winning. When asked the sexes of the five people they were thinking of tapping for nominations to higher offices, mostly men were named.

Also, Niven surveyed women holding local elected offices (to get a sample of potential women candidates for state legislature and Congress). 64% answered yes when asked “In your experience, have party leaders discouraged potential women candidates from running for office because of their gender?” The majority of those women told about “old boy networks.” In the words of one California Democrat, “women in the party are to rise no higher than volunteer work. Women elected to office rarely come from the party but run from the outside. If they win, the party quickly embraces them.”

So when I vote in a primary between the three people running to represent my party in the election for Senator, those three people haven’t been chosen by “the entire electorate.” Usually they’ve been chosen by the handful of party leaders and wealthy contributors whose support makes a candidate a “serious” candidate. And to say that there’ s a choice of three is an exaggeration; usually (at least in Oregon) there’s at most two serious candidates for the chance of being the Democratic or Republican candidate, and frequently there’s only one.

To blame the lack of women in congress on voters – who are basically nonsexist in making their choices – is ridiculous. Voters can’t vote for people who aren’t on the ballot.

There are some other factors — such as the fact that the large majority of elected politicians in America are from the very top bracket of income earners. But only about 23% of the Americans who have a money income over $75,000 are women (as of 2002, according to the 2004 Statistical Abstract of the U.S.). If there are significant wealth barriers to successfully running for higher political office in the U.S., and I think there are, then the pool of potential male candidates is larger than the pool of potential female candidates.

Also, the fact that women are generally expected to be in charge of raising children and taking care of elders who need caretaking means that women, on average, have less time available to pursue political careers than men. (There are individual exceptions to this, of course, but nonetheless the pool of men who have time to pursue politics is larger.)

Finally, consider the impact of incumbentcy. Especially as district boundaries in the US become more and more gerrymandered by the major parties, and as incumbent fundraising advantages become more important, any past inequality tends to perpetuate itself through the incumbent’s advantage. Even if you assume that sexism doesn’t exist anymore (an assumption not supported by evidence), past sexism will still have a very strong impact on who is in office.