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It Takes More Than a Candidate remains the only systematic account of the gender gap in political ambition. Based on national surveys of more than 10,000 potential candidates in 2001, 2011, and 2021, the book shows that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elective office. The gender gap in persists across generations and over time, despite society's changing attitudes toward women in politics. Women remain less likely to be recruited to run for office, less likely to think they are qualified to run, and less likely to express a willingness to run for office in the future. In the twenty years since It Takes a Candidate was first published, the book remains timely and eye-opening, highlighting the challenges women face navigating the candidate emergence process and providing insight into the persistent gender gap in political ambition.
When we uncovered a large gender gap in political ambition in the early 2000s, our research highlighted how far the United States was from gender parity in politics. Given marked increases in women’s numeric representation throughout the past two decades, many might expect the gender gap in political ambition to have begun to close. Results from our new study of potential candidates, however, reveal that the magnitude of the gender gap is just as large 20 years later, and two primary explanations persist as well. We posit that even though candidate recruitment has propelled more women into electoral politics, patterns of traditional gender socialization persist. These dynamics, coupled with negative perceptions of how female candidates are treated, continue to depress women’s interest in elective office. As long as running for office is a more remote endeavor for women than men, women’s full political inclusion will remain a distant goal.
The fifth edition of Gender and Elections offers a lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2020 elections. This timely yet enduring volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2020 elections and providing an in-depth analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding presidential, congressional, and state elections; voter participation, turnout, and choices; participation of African American women and Latinas; support of political parties and women's organizations; and candidate communication. New chapters explore the role of social movements in elections and introduce concepts of gendered and raced institutions, intersectionality, and identity politics applied to presidential elections from past to present. The resulting volume is the most comprehensive and reliable resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.
President Joe Biden gave his first address to Congress on April 28, 2021. He stood at the center of the US House rostrum, with two women seated behind him: Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Biden began his speech by recognizing the historic moment of which he was part: “Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium.” He added, “And it’s about time.” Biden was right. Never before 2021 had a woman served as vice president (and thus president of the Senate), nor had the first and only woman Speaker of the House – Nancy Pelosi – sat next to another woman during a presidential address to Congress. But it is the full picture of that moment, including Biden’s position at the podium as yet another white, male president of the United States, that captures the complexities of gender in the US elections in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
The 2018 and 2020 congressional elections were filled with dramatic developments for women candidates. But in very different ways. The 2018 election set a record, with a total of 126 women elected to serve in the US House and Senate, far surpassing the 110 who served in the prior Congress. There has not been a single election year jump this large since the historic “year of the woman” elections in 1992. But in 2018, the success of women candidates was entirely on the Democratic side of the aisle. In fact, as these historic numbers were being achieved, the number of Republican women serving in the House fell to its lowest number in several decades.
The fourth edition of Gender and Elections offers a systematic, lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2016 elections. This timely, yet enduring, volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important development for women as voters and candidates in the 2016 elections and providing a more long-term, in-depth analysis of the ways in which gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding and interpreting presidential elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidacies, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, congressional elections, the political involvement of Latinas, the participation of African American women, the support of political parties and women's organizations, candidate communications with voters, and state elections. Without question, Gender and Elections is the most comprehensive, reliable, and trustworthy resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.