An Absence of Estrogen in Politics: Why Aren't Women Running for Office?

By Elena Novak on September 10, 2013

There’s something missing from our political offices, and the answer is in the hormones. We need more estrogen.

Despite having successful female examples at the national level such as Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, and Nancy Pelosi, the number of women in political office is staggeringly low. According to a 2013 study by the Center for American Women and Politics, women comprise only 18.3% of Congress; in other words, they hold only 98 of the 535 seats.

State and local politics fare no better: women make up 23.1% of statewide executive offices, 24.2% of state legislatures, and approximately 17% of the mayoral positions in municipalities.

What’s keeping women out of politics? Apparently, nothing more than the fact that women are less likely to consider running for office in the first place. Research conducted by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox and published by the Brookings Institution, a D.C. think tank, revealed that women perform with equal success during the campaign stage. They simply are “substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elected office.”

Lawless and Fox found that this is because women are less likely to want to “endure the rigors of a political campaign,” to be “recruited to run for office,” to “have the freedom to reconcile work and family obligations with a political career,” to “think they are ‘qualified’ to run for office,” and to “perceive a fair political environment.”

These reasons ring fairly true from the perspective of female local officials presiding over Leon County, FL. Mary Ann Lindley, County Commissioner At-Large, noted that she is only the seventh woman to ever be elected to the Leon County Commission in its history of nearly two centuries.

Kristin Dozier, County Commissioner of District 5, attributes the lack of women in office to cultural barriers. “I think the biggest barrier really is a cultural norm that doesn’t show women in these leadership roles in 2013, and that women don’t think about this as something they want to do or could do,” she said. “Breaking down all of those other barriers, talking about fundraising, talking about confidence, whatever it might be, those are tools in the toolbox but we really just need women to start thinking that it’s possible and that they will have those tools and the resources.”

In other words, women might be more worried about having what it takes to mount a successful campaign than they are about what happens after they win. Lindley is grateful for the career she had in journalism, which taught her valuable skills that were transferable to her campaign. “I was very used to being in the public eye and talking to strangers,” she said. “I didn’t really appreciate it but that’s a really important skill when you’re campaigning. But you have to be really comfortable walking into a room of people who may be hostile…It’s not like you’re doing a feature story on quilting. You’re walking into difficult spots and you have to figure out how to tame it and talk to people and get the essence of what’s going on. But for me having the career in journalism was great in that respect and I think a lot of women have jobs, a lot of people have jobs, that don’t prepare them for that kind of thing.”

Besides having to constantly be in performance mode, political candidates have to also be comfortable asking for money. “Asking for money is hard,” Lindley said. “It’s kind of a learned skill and for me I had to not think of it as money for myself…I had to elevate it to ‘this is for a real cause, this is for a real purpose.’”

Perhaps the most difficult campaign hurdle to prepare for is being under constant public scrutiny, “exposing yourself and your family to people calling you names, people putting you down, people disagreeing vociferously with you, and the privacy part,” Lindley said. “If you have kids that are in high school, or middle school where they’re of an age where they’re either embarrassed or sensitive to what their parents are doing, people don’t run for office because they don’t want to expose their family to all that.”

But since these are just tools in the toolbox, they shouldn’t prevent women from considering a run for office, in Dozier’s opinion. “There are unique challenges for women candidates with how the media responds to them, fundraising, skills-building, that I think we do need to work on, but you can certainly overcome everything,” she said.

Another possible obstacle to women’s political involvement is deciding at which level to run – local, state, or national. “When we hear from women who are leaders who are saying we need more women to get involved, most of the time it’s women who are national figures or in the Senate or in the House or something like that; we have fewer women on the local level or on the state level really getting out and doing that,” Dozier said.

Want a woman you know to run? All you have to do is ask – several times. According to an article by Barbara Lee on Huffington Post Women, “women need to be asked between three and seven times to run for office. Men don’t wait to be asked.”

Graphic from WUPR.org

Though Lindley didn’t need to be asked because she always felt it was something she wanted to do and could do, Dozier had to be asked by many people over a span of a couple years. “If just one person had asked me I never would have done it. I hear that anecdotally from women across the country,” she said. “That friend of yours who knows a whole lot about local politics or state or something like that and loves the policy work and they’re your go-to person when election’s coming up, that’s the person that I think people should ask to run for office.”

Recent Florida State graduate Brooke Renney has been asked to run numerous times; having graduated with a dual degree in Political Science and International Affairs, she knows a significant amount about the political system, but is not currently planning to run.

“Women especially, I have noticed, just don’t take charge the way men do on political issues,” she said. “People care about what affects them the most, and I think politics and public policy has the ability to negatively affect men more than women and perhaps that’s why they tend to care more.” This is even more reason why women need fellow women in office to represent the needs they have that male political officials have a hard time relating to.

Renney also believes that media representation has deterred women from the ballot. “Women could feel insecure about running because society is typically harder on women in leadership positions,” she said. “Sarah Palin’s run for Vice President and Hillary Clinton’s constant scrutiny is a prime example of that. Sarah Palin was blamed for McCain’s failed presidency, and Bill Clinton is somehow always associated with Hillary’s success. I guess society may still view women as weak emotionally or incapable of serving as strong leaders.”

Amidst all the evidence that women are shy about throwing their hat in the ring, hope lies in educating women about their options, in training them in the necessary skills, and in men and women encouraging other women to take the plunge.

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