Thinking They’re ‘Unqualified’ Is A Big Reason More Women Don’t Run for Office

For one thing, there appears to be more self-doubt on the part of these high-powered women. A 2004 report by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox found that of a pool of prospective candidates — lawyers, business people, political activists — men were about twice as likely as women to say that they were qualified to run. Twenty-eight percent of women said they weren’t qualified at all, while only 12 percent of men found themselves lacking in some way. In the pop psychology parlance of 2016, we might note a whiff of imposter’s syndrome in these numbers.

It might not come as a surprise that just as women generally hold themselves to a higher standard in their self-examination before running for office, voters measure female candidates by different metrics than male candidates; there’s a very specific type of scrutiny that women politicians fall under. Women who might run for office seem to intuit that; a 2015 paper from the political scientists Kristin Kanthak and Jonathan Woon found that women are “election averse.” “Women’s entry into the candidate pool increases only if we simultaneously guarantee that campaigns are completely truthful and eliminate the private costs of running for office,” Kanthak and Woon found.

In a memo out this month from Lake Research Partners, Chesapeake Beach Consulting and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, entitled “Politics is Personal: Keys to Likeability and Electability for Women,” suggestions such as “Voters like informal photos of women candidates engaging with children” and “Voters like women officeholders who share credit with their teams, in addition to taking credit as an individual leader,” were on offer.

The memo, of the brass tacks strategy variety, says quite a bit about the line that female candidates must walk. “Women face a litmus test that men do not have to pass,” reads a passage in the document. “Women have to prove they are qualified. For men, their qualification is assumed.”

That’s why Sanders’ statement about Clinton’s qualifications cuts so deep — it seemed to send a volley at the fortress of qualification female candidates build up as proof of their worthiness to the public at large.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-calling-hillary-clinton-unqualified-smacks-of-sexism/