Women have cast more votes than their male counterparts in every election since 1964, and this year with almost 10 million more women than men registered to vote the ladies stole the swing vote spotlight for 2012. But despite the weight of women in the electorate, the number of women in positions of political power is disparagingly low, leaving us with the question: If women are such power voters, why aren’t more of them in office?
Women are staging a comeback. Nineteen ninety two set the national political stage on fire with record numbers of women elected to Senate driving pundits to dub it the “Year of the Woman.” For the past two decades issues like recession, national security, foreign policy and the debt ceiling have taken over the political rhetoric. But this November women used their power at polls to steal back the spotlight. On election night women dominated: The 113th Congress has broken records and glass ceilings with the highest representation by women the country has ever seen. The 2012 elections ushered in some big wins for women, with victories for high-profile candidates like Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) adding a dose of serious girl power to the standard election media storm and turning the “War on Women” into the “Year of the Woman.”
But don’t start singing Beyonce’s “Who Run the World (Girls)” just yet. Girls aren’t running the world, or the United States for that matter. Women still make up a disproportionately low number of those wielding the electorates’ political power and the glass ceiling shattered by our newly elected Congress is only at a fraction of what it would take to achieve parity. Despite the cries of victory lauding the 2012 election the most female-friendly since 1992’s “Year of the Woman,” the raw numbers paint a far less equal picture. The 113th Congress still remains, whiter, older, and significantly more male than the country it represents.
Women might be 51 percent of the population but they are only 20 percent of congress. “It is pathetic still…[women] are a fifth of the Senate. This is ludicrous, “ says Wendy Lesko, President of the Youth Activism Project and School Girls Unite. She finds this year’s elections to be shallow victories: “There’s progress but we still have a long way to go until there’s parity,” she says. Twenty twelve is not a substantial victory at all according to Jennifer Lawless, Director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University. “When you look at 1992, which was a ‘Year of the Woman’ there were very very substantial increases between the percentage of women serving [in Congress] in 1990 and then in 1992,” she says. “Those are not anywhere near the percentage changes we saw this election cycle even though we do reach record highs.”
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Take a look at the numbers. Women hold only 20 of the 100 seats in the Senate and 81 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Only three of the nine judges currently serving on the Supreme Court are women. Only five governors are women. In the 236 years that our nation has been an independent democracy, only 24 women have held presidential cabinet positions and only 13 women have run for presidential election.
Ironically, women are over represented in the ballot box. Women consistently cast larger majorities of the vote in national elections. Women have been voting at higher rates than men since 1980, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. In 2008, 60.4 percent of eligible women turned out at the polls compared to 55.7 percent of men, and the trend continued in 2012 with 53 percent of eligible females casting their ballots alongside only 47 percent of men.
Compounding this majority power at the polls is the power of the gender gap. As a general rule, women tend to vote more liberally than their male counterparts. According to the New York Times’ exit polls, 55 percent of women voted for President Obama – an 11-point lead over his Republican opponent – and the reported gender gap for 2012 hovers around 18 percent. According to CNN’s exit polls this number is up from 12 percent in 2008, suggesting that it was indeed the votes of women that drove election results in 2012. That’s a lot of power.
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So where are the results of that power? A number of factors play into the low number of women in office. “The reason that there are fewer women than men in elected office is not because of an actual bias against a women in votes,” says Laurel Harbridge, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. “A lot of the action is in the initial decisions of whether men and women think seriously about running for office.” In other words, women are still grossly underrepresented beginning with candidacy. Women can’t boost their percentages in office if they aren’t actually running for office. When they do find the motivation and support to run, they face a whole new set of challenges on top of those faced by their male opponents. “There’s what they call the double-bind, which basically is that if women cater to traditional feminine stereotypes then people view them as not capable of leading, but on the other hand if they break those stereotypes people are very uncomfortable with people who are counter-stereotypic,” says Yanna Krupnikov, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. “It’s a lose-lose situation for female candidates running for office.”
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That’s if women actually make it to the candidacy stage at all. Research done by Lawless, finds that women are 35 percent less likely than their male counterparts to ever be encouraged to run for office. And even if women do receive the necessary encouragement, there is still a remarkable lack of efficacy. “Young women do not see role models in their political leadership. There are notable exceptions, but by and large we’re still talking about a lot of white older men. We look at that and we think that’s our father or our uncle or our grandfather; it’s still a sense that it’s the old boys network,” Lesko says. “It’s this perception that that’s where the men play, this is male-dominated decision making.”
The idea that government office is an option for a girl is still a foreign one, even for someone exposed to politics at an early age says Joanne Conelley, School Girl’s Unite co-founder and student at American University. “We’ve created the idea that government is a boy’s club, or a career for men. I’ve been visiting my members of Congress since the 7th grade, but it still wasn’t until I was working on the Day of the Girl campaign that I had any sort of thought that maybe I should run for government one day, “ she says. The Day of the Girl Campaign launched this October as an international effort championed by both Conelley and Lesko to increase the voices of girls around the globe through education and increased political efficacy, and is part of a larger community of organizations dedicated to getting women more involved. She Should Run is an entire organization built on the need to get more women in office and serves to both encourage and support potential female candidates. “Women tend to have a higher standard of what it means to be a candidate,” says Clare Bresnahan, Programs Director for the Women’s Campaign Fund and supervisor of She Should Run. So like School Girls Unite and the Day of the Girl Campaign, they start at the source: “We work with a lot of organizations like Running Start, which is a great non-profit that encourages high school and college-age women to start running for office.”
Still, the political arena maintains a reputation as being out of reach for women. “There tends to be this perception out there that women have to be twice as good to get half as far [as their male counterparts],” Lawless says. Her research shows that although the road to office might be a tougher one for women, female candidates shouldn’t count themselves out; she finds that women have just as good a chance of being elected as their male counterparts if they make it to Election Day. Lesko sums up the situation bluntly: “There’s a glass ceiling on confidence,” she says.
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So let’s say Polly Politics has (1) received enough encouragement to consider running and (2) has enough confidence in her abilities to think she’s qualified for the job. That’s only half the battle. Her candidacy also faces hurdles male campaigns don’t. According to Harbridge research shows that “female potential candidates are less competitive, less confidant and more risk averse than their male counterparts,” which serve to make the campaign trail a more strenuous one. Women also have a harder time in the media spotlight, compounding all of the other deterrents; “Women more often than men are subject to comments and critiques in the media that relate to how they balance their work and family life and whether they fit female stereotypes or not,” says Harbridge. “High-profile women are certainly subject to more gender specific stereotypes in the media.”
Female candidates are portrayed in a sexualized context, undermining their legitimacy when they do make it to candidacy, explains Krupnikov. “There’s definitely a double standard. I’ve never seen an article that discusses the shoe choices of a male candidate,” she says referring to the extensive Huffington Post coverage of Michele Bachmann’s footwear during the primaries. The fact that there is an entire tumbler devoted to Bachmann’s shoe style should come as no surprise; we are a society more apt at discussing the First Lady’s pumps than her platform.
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There is hope. New Hampshire became the first state to double-down on female leadership this fall, electing Maggie Hassan to the Governor’s office and an all-female congressional delegation. High-profile congress wins like Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA), who is already beginning to inspire talk of a future presidential campaign among political pundits, pave the way for new generations of political leading ladies and prove that the media can be used for good and not evil. More importantly there is a growing number of role models emerging in political rhetoric. Warren is joined by Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), the first openly gay person in the U.S. Senate, Mazie Hirono(D-HI) the first Asian/Pacific Islander American woman elected Senator and only the second woman of color to serve in the U.S. Senate, and Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) the first Hindu American to serve in Senate and one of two female military veterans along with Tammy Duckworth (D-IL).
“The more role models we have the better, “ says Lesko, but we still need to take steps to change the structural factors that leave women both unwilling to run for office and reluctant to take those who do seriously. She finds that female activists usually pursue the non-profit route as a more acceptable place for a woman to advocate for change. That, she contends is tackling the problem from the wrong direction: “You should take your community service knowledge, your experience and then look at how this can be dealt with in the public policy arena so that you become a policy advocate for systemic change,” she says. “Government is the place the determines the rules and programs and services, not just for the few that a non-profit reaches, but for all.”
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We can’t expect any overnight changes according to Lawless. Potential candidates are working against centuries of gender socialization just to enter the political arena. “The qualities, characteristics and traits you need to succeed in the political arena are the qualities, characteristics and traits that women have not necessarily been socialized to possess,” she says. So even if there isn’t substantial empirical evidence to show bias against women at the polls, it’s clear that the road to parity is still a long one.
Realistically, the media frenzy probably won’t live up to its girl-power promises according to Harbridge, but it certainly hasn’t hurt. Despite the feminist battle cry’s echoing through out this election, women still vote for the candidate who is the strongest on the issue they are most concerned about, and that issue is still overwhelmingly the economy, according to Bresnahan. Even if 2012 is a shallow victory, it is still a victory for American women. Agenda setting looks a lot different when there are strong female voices on the national political stage and women’s issues are less likely to be swept aside. Women are more likely to change the conversation in Washington; Presumably, more women in office will lead to greater bipartisanship. Women bring different traits to the table that some studies suggest will change the current gridlocked dynamic on Capitol Hill, according to the National Council for Research on Women. But Lesko argues that real change will only happen with parity. Women won’t move from special interest group to full fledged female powerhouses until they reach at least 30 percent representation. There’s only one way to get there: run.