Davidson College professor of political science Melody Crowder-Meyer (pictured above) gave a lecture on women’s representation in American politics on Feb. 20. She discussed her study, which aims to examine male and female motives for running for office (Udeshi Seneviratne/Photo Editor).
Although women make up 51 percent of the United States population, they only make up 29 percent of the U.S. Congress. In the 1980s, female candidates for office were very rare in both the Republican and Democratic Parties; about 10 percent of candidates running for Congress were women in 1988.
This number has increased, as the percentage of female candidates in the Democratic party increased to over 40 percent in 2018, but Republican rates remain low. Overall, women are still underrepresented in politics.
On Feb. 20 in Doty Hall, Davidson College assistant professor of political science Melody Crowder-Meyer gave a lecture about women’s representation in American politics and how it has evolved over recent decades. Crowder-Meyer has studied the causes behind women’s underrepresentation in American politics as well as their particular underrepresentation in the Republican Party.
Crowder-Meyer’s study aims to examine male and female motives for running for office and therefore understand the disparity between male and female candidates, as well as the disparity between female candidates in the Democratic and Republican parties.
Crowder-Meyer examined the group of candidates who usually run for office and concluded that a typical profile is a middle-aged, well-educated, strong partisan person who works in a prestigious profession. Crowder-Meyer found that while the percentage of women who had these characteristics was very low in both parties in the 1970s, by the 2000s, this number had substantially increased. Half of all Democrats today now exhibit these characteristics and 25 percent of Republicans do.
While these female candidate pools are much larger today, there is still a disparity between the two parties, as well as a gap between the proportion of the possible female candidates and the women who are represented. Therefore, women’s underrepresentation cannot be fully explained by the supply of candidates.
This fact led Crowder-Meyer to examine people who ran for office who did not have these typical political backgrounds. She found that female motivations to run for office differ strongly from those of men.
“If you look at elite Americans … basically what you find is that men and women develop ambition in pretty much the same way,” Crowder-Meyer said. “The same factors that lead a woman from those elite groups to say that she is politically ambitious are the same factors that lead a man [to run for office]. But if you look at the typical, average, everyday person in that group, the factors that lead men to develop political ambition are almost totally different from the factors that lead women.”
These factors that lead ordinary men to develop political ambition are much more common than those factors that lead women. Men are much more likely to run for office once they marry, but women are not. Higher levels of education increase male ambition, but not female ambition. The biggest factor for developing female political ambition was being encouraged to run for office by personal and political sources, while this factor had no impact on men.
Crowder-Meyer revealed data that showed that while Democrats support women running for office and encourage female political participation through organizations such as Onward Together and Emerge America, Republican female political action committees are not supported, with less than 10 percent of Republican Party donors giving aid to groups like the Susan B. Anthony List. Republican donors who Crowder-Meyer spoke to were also much less likely to say that gender issues are important to them.
Given the fact that encouraging women to run for office is a huge political motivator for non-elite groups of women to develop political ambition, this is a strong indicator of the disparity between female candidates in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
Understanding these differences in the political cultures of both parties is important in order to find ways to increase female participation in the Republican Party. In addition, analyzing the factors that lead to female participation in general can help the U.S. increase female political representation, as women are drastically underrepresented in our society.