{"id":68747,"date":"2016-04-28T10:29:37","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T15:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=68747"},"modified":"2016-04-23T22:59:56","modified_gmt":"2016-04-24T03:59:56","slug":"why-arent-there-more-women-in-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2016\/04\/28\/why-arent-there-more-women-in-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Aren’t There More Women in Politics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

NPR\u00a0recently\u00a0aired a\u00a0story<\/a>\u00a0about\u00a0female lawmaker\u2019s representation state by state. According to the story, Colorado has the most women; female lawmakers make\u00a0up 42% of\u00a0that total. Wyoming\u00a0had the\u00a0least, with women only representing 13% of state lawmakers.<\/p>\n

NPR’s experts\u00a0suggested that term limits in\u00a0Colorado and a female-friendly party leadership\u00a0were behind\u00a0their high number of female legislators,\u00a0whereas a change in Wyoming from multi-member to single-member district in the 1990s was unfavorable to women (because voters have to pick only one and tend to lean toward men when they have to make hard choices).\u00a0The story\u00a0also mentioned\u00a0voting rules and the difficulty of balancing home, work, and lawmaking responsibilities.<\/p>\n

In fact, sociologists have been studying this issue in depth for some time and a few years ago Deborah Carr\u00a0summarized<\/a>\u00a0the reigning wisdom on why\u00a0women are less likely to be politicians.\u00a0She highlighted six factors to explain the gender gap in the US Congress:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Women have to face sexism (e.g., glass ceiling \u2013 Nancy Pelosi used the term\u00a0marble ceiling <\/i>in her\u00a0<\/i>inaugural speech as Speaker in 2007), especially voters\u2019 sex role stereotyping \u201cwhat women can and should be.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. Women are not in the \u201cpipeline,\u201d suggesting that\u00a0not enough\u00a0women\u00a0are in careers that have historically led to political office.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
        \n
      1. Because of gendered wealth and income inequality, women don\u2019t as often have enough money to run multi-dollar campaigns, nor access to social networks\u00a0full of\u00a0big donors.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
          \n
        1. Women have different\u00a0interests, focusing on \u201cissues related to family and social welfare, rather than national defense and international relations.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
            \n
          1. Women are less likely to be risk-takers than their male counterparts,\u00a0perhaps explaining\u00a0why women\u00a0must be asked several times<\/a>\u00a0before they seriously consider launching campaigns.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
              \n
            1. Women opt out of politics because of family responsibilities.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              \"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

              To improve female participation in politics, we should promote more gender-neural political environments. Political parties should take further steps to recruit and support female candidates, as Colorado seems to be doing. We should repeatedly encourage women to run for office since they take a lot of encouragement before they seriously consider launching candidacies. More importantly, we need to\u00a0seed the pipeline by encouraging young girls to get involved in student government\u00a0and see governing as compatible with their interests and abilities.<\/p>\n

              Sangyoub Park, PhD is a professor of sociology at Washburn University<\/a>. His research interests include social capital, demographic trends, and post-Generation Y. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

              NPR\u00a0recently\u00a0aired a\u00a0story\u00a0about\u00a0female lawmaker\u2019s representation state by state. According to the story, Colorado has the most women; female lawmakers make\u00a0up 42% of\u00a0that total. Wyoming\u00a0had the\u00a0least, with women only representing 13% of state lawmakers. NPR’s experts\u00a0suggested that term limits in\u00a0Colorado and a female-friendly party leadership\u00a0were behind\u00a0their high number of female legislators,\u00a0whereas a change in Wyoming from multi-member […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":68776,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,23666,55,2094,2098,64,272,3920,85,461,283,309],"class_list":["post-68747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economics","tag-economics-social-welfare","tag-gender","tag-gender-politics","tag-gender-prejudicediscrimination","tag-globalization","tag-marriagefamily","tag-nation-united-states","tag-politics","tag-human-rights","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-warmilitary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2016\/04\/5-4.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68747"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68778,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68747\/revisions\/68778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}