When Democrat Patricia Schroeder won a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1972, she was a thirty-one-year-old mother of two. Her children were six and four. Before her term even began, Ms. Schroeder received a phone call from her soon-to-be colleague Congresswoman Bella Abzug. “I hear you have little kids … You won’t be able to do this job,” Abzug said.Footnote ¹ Implicit in the warning was the assumption that, in addition to being a member of Congress, Ms. Schroeder would naturally be expected to remain the primary caretaker of her children.

Thirty-five years later, the broad assumption that it was impossible to be both a mother and a member of Congress has dissipated, but women’s experiences on Capitol Hill continued to highlight the challenges. A 2007 Washington Post article chronicled the trials and tribulations of the ten congresswomen at the time with children under the age of thirteen. Characterized as residing on “a shaky high wire, balancing motherhood with politicking, lawmaking, fundraising, and the constant shuttle between Washington and their home states,” the women recounted the judgment and scrutiny they regularly withstood for the parenting and professional balance they chose to strike.Footnote ² Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, for example, noted the criticism she received in the press for pulling a crayon out of her bag, as opposed to a pen.Footnote ³ Republican Heather Wilson shared that her harshest critic was her own daughter. The former congresswoman explained that her weekly commute to Washington, DC, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, coupled with the complete loss of privacy for her family, was “sometimes too much” for her ten year old.Footnote ⁴

By 2023, the climate for congresswomen with young children had continued to improve. The number of women with children under the age of eighteen had increased to thirty-seven.Footnote ⁵ The US Senate had unanimously agreed to change its rules so that members may bring infants onto the floor to breastfeed.Footnote ⁶ And following the 2018 midterm elections, Wasserman-Schultz had created monthly “Moms in the House” events for congresswomen with children. The group’s mission is to offer one another support, share advice, and “help each other be successful.”Footnote ⁷

Congress may be more hospitable for mothers than it was in Pat Schroeder’s day, but women still find themselves navigating dual roles. In a recent report, the Vote Mama Foundation, an organization dedicated to making it easier for women with children to enter politics, itemized a series of challenges that continue to make it difficult for mothers to serve in Congress: votes during late nights and weekends; constant fundraising; and long commutes to and from the district.Footnote ⁸ Democratic Congresswoman Grace Meng’s experiences epitomize these circumstances. She noted that when votes go late on the House floor, she’s left scrambling. Even though Washington, DC, is hundreds of miles from her New York City home and family, she’s often still responsible for planning meals and arranging childcare. When there’s a late floor vote or unexpected change to her schedule, she has to “call people last minute and cross [her] fingers and pray” that someone can pick up the slack.Footnote ⁹

In this chapter, we examine whether traditional family role orientations systematically hinder women’s emergence in the political sphere. We begin by considering how potential candidates’ early political socialization relates to their political ambition as adults. The majority of the chapter then turns to gender dynamics in respondents’ current households. Our findings reveal that even among the youngest generation of potential candidates, women are less likely than men to have grown up in politicized households, more likely to be responsible for the majority of household tasks and childcare, and less likely to be encouraged to run by those closest to them. But somewhat surprisingly, the traditional division of labor doesn’t affect interest in running for office. Although women continue to struggle balancing family with professional responsibilities, traditional gender roles don’t impede their interest in running for office the way many might expect.

Raised to Be a Candidate

History is rife with politicians from different generations of the same family. Former US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s father, Thomas D’Alesandro, was a Maryland congressman for eight years and the mayor of Baltimore for more than a decade. Democratic Congressman Rob Menendez served his first term in the House of Representatives (2023–2025) alongside his father Bob, who served in the US Senate. Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, and Shelley Moore Capito all had fathers who served in the US Congress. The same is true for Democratic Representatives Jimmy Panetta, Andy Levin, and Lucille Roybal-Allard. US Senator Susan Collins’s mother and father each served as mayor of Caribou, Maine. And US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s father served as the US ambassador first to Laos and then to Thailand.

Political family ties often extend beyond two generations. The Kennedys have been active in politics since Joseph Kennedy was appointed US ambassador to Great Britain in 1937. They’ve produced one president, two US senators, several members of the US House of Representatives, a lieutenant governor, ambassadors, and multiple state and local elected officials.Footnote ¹⁰ For a political dynasty on the Republican side of the aisle, look no further than the Bushes. Prescott Bush was elected US senator from Connecticut in 1952. The Bush family went on to generate two presidents, a US senator, two governors, ambassadors, and several local officeholders.Footnote ¹¹

While inheriting Kennedy or Bush level political exposure and electoral opportunities may be uncommon, more modest levels of political interest are often passed on within the family unit.Footnote ¹² When Rhode Island State Representative Teresa Tanzi was elected in 2010, she credited her mother with inspiring her to run for office. “She definitely laid the foundation for what drives me today … I still hear her voice in my head, telling me as a child, ‘Don’t be a follower, be a leader!’”Footnote ¹³ And that’s a message Tanzi passed down to her own daughter, who was a fixture at both the State House and on the campaign trail. In 2023, the high school senior, who was only five years old when Tanzi was first elected, won the 2023 Rhode Island Civic Leadership Award, given to students who have made outstanding contributions to their communities.Footnote ¹⁴

More generally, political scientists find that young people whose parents vote, emphasize the importance of voting, or take them to the polls are much more likely to be regular voters later in life. Teenagers who discuss politics with their parents know more about public affairs and are more likely to be politically active than people who aren’t raised that way. They’re also more likely to attend community meetings, sign petitions, participate in boycotts, and contribute money to political candidates and causes.Footnote ¹⁵ Young people’s involvement in political associations, campaigns, community service, and school elections also heightens political interest and activism.Footnote ¹⁶ The same is true when young people are exposed to civics education in high school or major in a social science in college.Footnote ¹⁷

Many of the potential candidates we interviewed referred to their early childhoods when describing when they first became interested in politics. Consider Jonathan Shanahan, a lawyer from Boston, who has been politically active since high school: “My parents were always discussing politics,” he recalled. “It was in my blood to be interested in the news. I remember Reagan’s second inauguration like it was yesterday, even though I was just a little kid.” Shana Mills, a social sciences professor who frequently attends demonstrations and rallies promoting social justice, also attributed her political interest and activism to her political family: “Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King were a big part of my life at home. Their pictures were on the walls. They were my role models.”

Because the early political socialization process can instill the importance of taking part in the democratic process, it’s important to determine whether women and men in the candidate eligibility pool were exposed to similar patterns in their childhood homes. We asked respondents two questions to get at these early experiences: how often they recall discussing politics with their parents and whether they ever ran for office as students. Figure 4.1 reveals that roughly one in four respondents were raised in households where politics was a regular topic of discussion. Approximately 80 percent grew up in families where political discussions occurred at least occasionally. Further, more than one-third (36 percent) ran for a student government position in high school or college.

Figure 4.1 Potential candidates’ early political socialization

Notes: Number of cases varies slightly, as some respondents omitted answers to some questions. Gender differences significant at p < 0.05 for the bottom two comparisons.

While many potential candidates were raised in politicized homes, notable gender differences emerge. The gender gap in a politicized upbringing is particularly prominent among Republicans. Women were nine percentage points more likely than men to report never talking about politics with their parents when they were growing up. The gender gap among Democrats is only four percentage points. If we focus just on potential candidates under the age of forty, the gender gap in never talking about politics among Republicans is almost three times larger than it is among Democrats (seventeen points compared to six). Overall, these gender differences reflect patterns of traditional gender socialization that promote men’s greater exposure to politics.Footnote ¹⁸ Further, they represent movement in the wrong direction. In the 2001 sample of potential candidates, we uncovered no gender difference on either measure.Footnote ¹⁹

Many of the people we interviewed noted that the politicized households in which they were raised not only instilled a sense of civic duty and familiarity with the political system, but also triggered thoughts of running for office. Danny Goldberg, a political activist from Pennsylvania, linked his interest in politics to discussions with his father:

Lila Simons, who works for a nonprofit organization in New York, also grew up in a political household. She remembers watching political debates and conventions with her parents and going with them to vote. She also found a stack of “Dukakis for President” signs in the garage. “I was so excited,” she recalled. “My cousins and I played ‘Election’ for, like, two years.” By the time she was sixteen, Ms. Simons had run for student council, volunteered on a gubernatorial campaign, and convinced her parents to let her take a bus to Pennsylvania to knock on doors for Al Gore. These experiences provided a foundation for her interest in running for office as an adult: “I’ve been involved in politics since I was a little kid … The idea that I might one day run has always been in the back of my mind.”

We analyzed the relationship between political ambition and a politicized upbringing by supplementing our baseline model of interest in running for office with a measure of the frequency with which respondents spoke about politics with their parents and an indicator for whether they ran for office in high school or college.Footnote ²⁰ Sex remains a significant predictor of considering a candidacy (the gender gap is roughly fourteen percentage points).Footnote ²¹ But a politicized upbringing exerts a substantial effect. A woman who never talked about politics with her parents and didn’t run for office as a student has only a 0.22 probability of considering a candidacy. Frequent political discussions and a student council run increase that probability to 0.52. The magnitude of the effect is similar for men (0.35 versus 0.67). As the data presented in Figure 4.1 illustrate, however, women are less likely than men to benefit from the formative experiences that spur political ambition.

Family Structures and Roles

Much of women’s political participation and activism throughout US history can be linked to their family roles. As early as the women’s suffrage movement in the 1890s, women relied on their distinct “private sphere” roles as mothers and caretakers of the home to justify their entry into politics. Susan B. Anthony and other suffrage advocates argued that women were the solution to the rampant government corruption, political machines, and party bosses dominant in late nineteenth-century America. Women, they suggested, possessed the characteristics needed to take the corruption out of politics: benevolence, morality, selflessness, and industry.Footnote ²² Further, women’s exclusion from public life meant that their partisan loyalties weren’t firm; they were less likely than men to be vulnerable to party bosses. The suffrage movement’s affiliation with the temperance movement also emphasized family roles. Women bore witness to the trouble liquor wreaked in the private sphere and, accordingly, were well suited to encourage its prohibition.Footnote ²³

By the 1960s, the rallying cry for women’s full equality and political integration focused on dismantling the gendered conceptual framework of private (in the home) and public (in politics and industry) spheres.Footnote ²⁴ Political activists, such as Betty Friedan, and feminist theorists, including Carole Pateman and Susan Moller Okin, argued that the dichotomy itself was false.Footnote ²⁵ The notion of the autonomous man, free to engage the public world, failed to recognize that men were not independent. Rather, their public sphere entry and success relied on women’s familial care. Women’s rights advocates began to argue that the private realm of women’s lives must be made part of the public discourse. In effect, these efforts aimed to break down the dichotomy and integrate “private sphere” issues, such as childcare and domestic abuse, into “public sphere” policy debates.

The extent to which traditional family structures and roles continue to affect women’s inclusion in public life is not entirely evident. Barriers to women’s advancement in formerly male professional fields are far less onerous. And the conception of a rigid set of gender roles has dissipated with the increasing number of two career families. Yet surveys of two income households continue to find that women spend twice as many hours as men on household tasks, such as cleaning and laundry. Married women continue to perform significantly more of the cooking and childcare, even when they are the primary breadwinners in a family.Footnote ²⁶

What’s more, when women do enter the public sphere, they often face what scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson calls the “double bind.” Writing thirty years ago, she explained that “the history of western culture is riddled with evidence of traps for women that have forcefully curtailed their options.”Footnote ²⁷ Women who venture out of the “proper sphere” often find themselves in a “catch-22”: If they achieve professional success, then they have likely neglected their “womanly” duties; if they fail professionally, then they were wrong to attempt entering the public domain in the first place. Law professor Lara Bazelon’s recent book, Ambitious Like a Mother, chronicles examples of how this dynamic persists today. Whereas society doesn’t expect working men to prioritize fatherhood, women must constantly reassure people that they put motherhood first. Otherwise, they’ll be perceived as “too ambitious.”Footnote ²⁸ Essentially, professional women are constantly judged not only by how they manage their careers, but also by how well they perform the duties of a wife and mother. In order to be successful public citizens, women must also be successful private citizens. Perhaps for these reasons, studies have found that women continue to be primarily responsible for housework and childcare even after they are elected to public office.Footnote ²⁹

The double bind serves as a dilemma that women who are well positioned to run for public office continue to confront. From the outset, female potential candidates are significantly less likely than men to have traditional family arrangements (see top of Table 4.1). Women are about 40 percent more likely than men to be single, separated, or divorced. They are nearly 15 percent less likely to have children.Footnote ³⁰ These gender differences are distinct from the general population, where women and men are equally likely to be married,Footnote ³¹ and women are more likely than men to have children.Footnote ³²

Female potential candidates’ family structures might reflect that being a wife or mother can serve as an impediment to professional achievement, a goal that women in the sample already attained. Many women we interviewed in 2003 mentioned this dynamic. Lori Corrigan, who had practiced law in New York for more than twenty years, told us that for the women in her firm, “The child thing is still a big issue … probably always will be. We just lost three dynamite young [women] because they had to take time out to have children. Men never, in my experience, have left for childcare duties.” Ms. Corrigan, a successful litigator, went on to note that she and her husband decided that if she wanted to be a “go-getter as a lawyer,” then they “just could not have children.” Julia Finch, an attorney with broad experience in her community, echoed this sentiment: “Of the top five women attorneys in my city, only two are married, and only one has a child. That can’t be a coincidence.” Put somewhat differently by Wilma Morales, the vice president of marketing for a large company based in Chicago, “Women are less willing to compromise on family and are thus willing to sacrifice professionally. Men are not forced to choose.”

These comments don’t sound terribly different from those we heard from potential candidates in the summer of 2023. Nancy Climer, for instance, is a business executive from California. She tries to mentor the women in her company so they see that “we aren’t in the 1950s anymore … women are still pigeon-holed into raising children, even when they have a full-time job and a spouse with more flexibility.” Rebecca McDougal, a bankruptcy lawyer, is one of six partners in her firm, but the only woman. “We hire lots of women out of law school,” she explained. “But when all is said and done, most of them choose to stay home and raise kids or choose an alternative career that makes it easier to work and raise a family at the same time.”

The men we interviewed tend to agree. According to Jim Minton, a marketing professional, women in his company haven’t climbed the career ladder at the same rate as men because they’ve taken time off to have children. “It’s unfortunate,” he commented. “But by taking time off, they’re slower to get the requisite experience.” Blaine Cuperton, a politically active attorney, summarized it well: “I read that there are more Fortune 500 CEOs named John than there are women who are CEOs of these companies combined. To succeed at that level, you need to be singularly dedicated. No distractions, including family. Women can’t do that because they have to balance work and family.”

The demands and expectations required for professional success may continue to lead women in the candidate eligibility pool to eschew traditional family structures. But those women who are married or do have children tend to embody traditional gender role orientations. We asked respondents whether they or their partners are responsible for the majority of household work and childcare. The bottom half of Table 4.1 reveals a gendered division of labor. In families where both adults are working (often in high-level careers), women are more than twice as likely as men to bear responsibility for the majority of household tasks. They’re more than three times as likely to be the primary childcare provider. These differences in family responsibilities are not merely a matter of perception; both sexes recognize this organization of labor. Thirty percent of men acknowledge that their spouses/partners are responsible for a majority of household tasks, while only 8 percent of women make the same claim.

Somewhat surprisingly, we uncovered few generational differences in women’s responsibilities. Fifty-one percent of women who are at least sixty years old reported that they are responsible for the majority of the household tasks, compared to 53 percent of women in the forty to fifty-nine cohort, and 57 percent of women under the age of forty. When it comes to childcare, roughly two-thirds of women in all three age cohorts shoulder all or most of the responsibilities. We do, however, see generational differences among male respondents. Men in the youngest cohort are roughly 50 percent more likely than those in the oldest cohort to identify as being primarily responsible for the housework (32 percent versus 20 percent). They are nearly three times more likely (33 percent versus 12 percent) to be the primary childcare provider. While it is certainly important to note that among younger generations of men there is a move toward a more egalitarian distribution of household labor and childcare, women don’t perceive the shift.Footnote ³³

The pervasive subtext that emerged in our interviews suggests that, in many cases, the traditional roles women take on are so ingrained that the behavior is almost programmed. Beth Peltz, a state director for a national public interest group, expressed a sentiment typical of many women we interviewed in 2003:

In a moment of self-reflection, Professor of English Teri Morse bemoaned the fact that she succumbs to the same pattern:

In 2023, the comments sounded similar, although many were accompanied by a general sense that circumstances should have improved by now. Eliza Davis, a high school teacher from Iowa, mentioned that all of her decisions revolve around her children – “how much time I’m spending with them, whether they have well-rounded activities.” She said that her husband “cares, of course, about how they are and what they’re doing,” but that it’s “not the same, even if it should be.” Guy Dorfman, a lawyer from Colorado, concluded that “old habits tend to live long lives.” He elaborated by telling us about many couples in his friend group who are “super progressive.” But even when the woman earns more than the man, and he’s supportive of her professional success, ingrained gender roles persist:

Jan Curran’s experiences are comparable. The small businessowner stipulated that the division of labor in her household “it not as bad as it used to be, like in my parents’ generation” but it’s still “pretty traditional.” Even though she “usually doesn’t admit it,” she told us that she and her husband still basically live like “family is for women to take care of.”

The results presented in Table 4.1, coupled with the qualitative evidence, reveal that traditional family structures and roles are still entrenched within the candidate eligibility pool. Many women have overcome the barriers associated with patterns of traditional gender socialization by virtue of attaining professional success in traditionally male-dominated fields. But many have either not married, not had children, or been forced to reconcile their careers with their family responsibilities, something fewer men have had to do.

Wife, Mother, and Candidate? Family Roles as Impediments to Political Ambition

Research finds that married people are more likely than single people to vote and participate politically.Footnote ³⁴ But at least for women, the same traditional family structures that spur political participation might detract from the likelihood of pursuing or maintaining a political career. Former Georgia State Representative Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, for example, entered politics in 1998, several years before she was married or a parent. Reflecting on one of her reelection campaigns in which she went door to door while pushing her twenty-two-month-old son in a stroller, she explained that she would never have taken the initial plunge and run for office the first time if she had a husband and a young child.Footnote ³⁵

In another example, Nebraska State Senator Julie Slama announced in February 2024 that she would not seek reelection. In an online message to her constituents, Representative Slama recounted a harrowing day in which her infant son accompanied her to a series of committee hearings. He was particularly fussy and his “peaceful slumber turned immediately into cries … After three failed attempts, the committee hearing came to a close.” Driving home from the Capitol that night, Slama concluded that juggling motherhood, a law practice, and a political career left everyone “shortchanged.” She decided it was time to “pursue a new chapter as a mom.”Footnote ³⁶ Summarized by Anna Eshoo, who served in Congress for thirty-two years before retiring in January 2025, “People always ask us: How do you balance your personal life with your public life? My answer immediately is: It’s not balanced. This has to come first.”Footnote ³⁷

The conventional wisdom, therefore, has converged on the premise that traditional family role orientations serve as significant impediments to women’s candidate emergence.Footnote ³⁸ If these roles make it more difficult for women who have already been elected, then surely they must affect the likelihood that women will even think about a political candidacy in the first place. Indeed, gender and politics textbooks regularly conclude that women’s absence from high-level electoral politics is linked to their family roles.Footnote ³⁹

Our survey data allow us to assess the degree to which traditional family structures and roles systematically contribute to the gender gap in political ambition. We supplemented our baseline model of considering a candidacy – which already includes marital and parental status – with gauges of family responsibilities. First, we focused on the subsample of respondents who are married and living with a partner to assess whether being responsible for the majority of household tasks affects interest in running for office. Then we restricted the sample to respondents with children to determine whether responsibility for the majority of the childcare affects political ambition.Footnote ⁴⁰

The regression results indicate that household and childcare responsibilities are not statistically significant predictors of interest in running for office. As the predicted probabilities displayed in Figure 4.2 illustrate, regardless of whether women are responsible for the majority of household tasks and childcare, they are equally likely – or, compared to men, equally unlikely – to consider running for office.

Figure 4.2 The effects of household and childcare responsibilities on political ambition

Notes: Predicted probabilities are based on the regression results presented in Table A5 (with continuous variables set at their means and dummy variables at their modes). The analysis of household responsibilities is restricted to respondents who are married or living with a partner. The analysis of childcare responsibilities is restricted to respondents with children. The predicted probabilities for women are not statistically distinguishable from one another, nor are the probabilities for men.

At first glance, these results might seem surprising. How could women’s disproportionate levels of household and familial responsibilities not affect their political ambition? Part of the answer may be that the prevailing wisdom about the challenges of navigating family and politics derives almost exclusively from studies of actual candidates and elected officials – all of whom exhibited political ambition regardless of their family structures or roles. Moreover, to expect traditional family arrangements to stunt women’s political ambition is to ignore the reality that many women have already reconciled being the primary caretaker of the home and children with their professional lives as lawyers, executives, school principals, professors, and heads of political organizations. If family roles were going to hold them back professionally, then women in the political pipeline would have already been stymied.

That doesn’t mean, however, that family roles and responsibilities are absent from women’s considerations when thinking about entering the electoral arena. Vanessa Muraco, a small business owner in the South, referred to the “backwards philosophy that still exists – we’re supposed to raise the kids, do the dishes, clean the house. How are we also supposed to get involved in politics, organize rallies, run for office? The minute women start thinking about it, they realize how impossible it would be.” Tracy Ball, the director of a state environmental organization, wondered:

Several women elaborated specifically on the different weight mothers and fathers place on children when considering entering the electoral arena. Barbara Kim, a New York executive, noted that families are more important to women than they are to men:

Attorney Lizzy Rafferty offered a similar assessment:

Nikki Dobson, a government lawyer who thought about running for school board, agreed: “I know I’d do a better job than the people on the Board,” she explained. “But the time commitment would mean that I’d be doing a worse job for my family … Give me a nanny and I’m in!”

Several women described delaying their political ambition until they’re no longer so focused on their families. Bella Smith, a lawyer who practices in Portland, Oregon, for instance, has been “fascinated” by politics since she watched the 1968 Democratic convention as a seven year old. She thinks about running for office because of her “constant urge to make a difference.” But Ms. Smith explained that, at this point in her life, when she’s not working, she is “chasing teenagers. Doing anything else would be a giant hassle.” She hopes that she’ll have a chance to get more politically involved when her children are out of the house. Jan Henderson, a public school administrator in Kansas, mentioned a long-term plan to run for the state legislature, but she noted, “I am a mom, so I have to wait until my girls are grown. They range in age from six to sixteen.” Ms. Henderson then elaborated on how she planned to pursue her political ambition:

Several men mentioned that they’d be concerned about the time commitment involved in running for office, and thought it would be “tough,” “sad,” or “a real drawback” to sacrifice time with their families. But only a handful of the men we interviewed in 2023 considered it “impossible” to balance their parental responsibilities with their political ambition. And one didn’t arrive at this conclusion until after he ran for the state legislature in Mississippi: “When I ran, I’d only been married a couple of years. I had a kid and another on the way. I was broke as a joke … Looking back, I really shouldn’t have run. It wasn’t fair to my wife, to my kid. But I was twenty-seven. What did I know?”

The hundreds of interviews we conducted with potential candidates about the interaction between family responsibilities and political ambition paint a complex picture. Despite the lopsided division of labor in their homes, women who are primary caretakers of the family are no less likely to think about running for office. But for many of them, family roles make a political candidacy seem more difficult, more complex, or more contingent on the right timing. And our findings might underestimate the role of family on women’s political ambition. After all, the perpetuation of traditional family arrangements can affect women’s career choices before they enter the candidate eligibility pool, making it less likely that they’ll ever work in the professions from which most candidates emerge.

Encouragement from the Inner Circle

An additional way that family can affect political ambition pertains to the encouragement and support potential candidates receive for entering the political arena. People typically don’t run for office – or even think about it – without the support of those closest to them: their spouses/partners and other family members. Two aspects of our gender socialization framework suggest that women may be at a disadvantage on this front. Foremost, pervasive traditional gender role orientations may result in family members simply not thinking about women as people who could enter the public sphere as candidates. Second, the masculinized ethos of the political system reinforces this dynamic because the people in these women’s lives who might otherwise offer support and encouragement see a political system dominated by men.

We asked potential candidates whether their spouse/partner or other family member ever suggested that they run for office. Men were 50 percent more likely than women to report that their spouse encouraged them to enter the political arena as a candidate. They were 40 percent more likely to recount encouragement from another family member. As illustrated in Figure 4.3, women were also less likely than men to report encouragement to run for office from a colleague or member of the clergy. Overall, men were a third more likely than women to have someone in their personal sphere encourage them to run for office.

Figure 4.3 Personal sources of encouragement for a candidacy

Notes: Bars represent the percentages of women and men who reported receiving encouragement to run for office from each source. Gender differences statistically significant at p < 0.05 in all comparisons. N = 2,124 for women and 1,904 for men.

Many women and men we interviewed indicated that support and encouragement serve as critical precursors to considering a run for office. Mona Gregory, a college professor from Louisiana, attributed her ongoing interest in seeking elective office to support from her inner circle: “I wouldn’t be able to do anything like run without the backing of my husband and friends.” Alabama businessman Edwin Thompson, who actually ran for office, also identified the importance of personal sources of encouragement:

Robert Gore, who “flirts” with running for city and county level office “from time-to-time,” shared that he has “always had lots of friends, colleagues, and family members telling [him] to go for it.” The Colorado lawyer also mentioned that opposing counsel on several high-profile trials encouraged him to think about running for Congress. “That kind of support, across my whole life, lets me know that if I ever wanted to run, I’d have the backing I’d need,” he told us.

The flip side of the coin is also relevant. Nikki Dobson, the lawyer who would run for office if she could hire a nanny, explained that when she broached running for school board with her husband, “he didn’t want anything to do with it. And there’s no extended family around here, so without his support, it’s not even worth a second thought.” Jenna Arkowsky-Rooks arrived at a similar conclusion:

For many women we interviewed, the lack of encouragement from family members and friends corroborates their own notions that a political candidacy just isn’t realistic.

Consistent with the interview evidence, our survey data reveal the power of a supportive personal environment. We added to the baseline model that predicts who considers running for office a measure of whether the respondent ever received encouragement or a suggestion to run from one of the sources listed in Figure 4.3. The probability of considering a candidacy increases by approximately forty percentage points when a potential candidate receives encouragement from a spouse, family member, colleague, or member of the clergy.Footnote ⁴¹ All else equal, a woman who has never been encouraged to run has only a 0.18 predicted probability of considering a candidacy. That likelihood increases to 0.58 when she receives the suggestion. Men’s likelihood of considering a run increases from 0.27 to 0.71 when they receive external support. The gender gap, of course, persists. But among those who have been recruited to run for office, it’s down to thirteen percentage points (which is 13 percent smaller than in the baseline model).

Conclusion

The relationship between family and political ambition is complicated. Politicized upbringings spur thoughts of a candidacy. Accordingly, women are somewhat disadvantaged because they’re less likely than men to have engaged in political discussions with their parents or to have run for office as students. But the effects of current family structures and roles are less straightforward. On one hand, a traditional division of labor persists in many potential candidates’ households. Regardless of the advances women have made entering the workforce and achieving professional success, there hasn’t been concomitant progress when it comes to managing the home or the children. On the other hand, our empirical measures of family responsibilities do not predict political ambition. Women who shoulder the majority of household and childcare responsibilities are no less likely to think about running for office than those with a more equitable distribution of household labor.

This doesn’t mean, though, that family roles and responsibilities don’t affect the calculus for many women. Strong qualitative evidence suggests that women’s roles as the primary caretaker of the children and the household might not preclude the consideration of a candidacy, but they do make it more complex. Further, the survey data indicate that women are less likely than men to receive the suggestion to run from those who know them best – their spouses and partners, family members, colleagues, and clergy members – perhaps a result of being perceived as too busy, too over-extended, or too involved on the home front. Without external support, women and men alike are less likely to consider entering the political arena.

What emerges from this analysis is the reality that women, across generations, face a complicated set of choices. Thirty-seven-year-old high school teacher Jennie Bolt-Dreier, for example, offered a succinct assessment of the dilemma women face: “Women are still busier with the household and the kids. That’s a deterrent for any working mom.” Her remarks sound a lot like those of Sally Jensen, whose children graduated from college in 2010. She told us that she never thought much about running for office: “My family arrangements wouldn’t have made it possible … I never would have thought about putting my children second.” She went on to speculate that “lots of women probably feel that way.” Helen Nelson, a seventy-year-old retired Florida businesswoman we interviewed twenty years earlier, reached the same conclusion: “Not much has changed regarding perceptions of a ‘woman’s place.’ People still think that a woman should be in the home raising a family.”

Unlike most men, many women confront the difficulty of reconciling their careers and their families. The consequences of this double bind often leave them unsatisfied. Maggie Carter, a lawyer with broad experience working in the public and private sector, remarked, “I don’t know any professional women who are happy with the choices that they have made … Women are constantly pulled in different directions.” As a result, for many female potential candidates, considering entering the electoral arena would mean thinking about the prospect of taking on a third job, which is pretty unappealing when they’re already spread quite thin.