Getting Past the Gender Gap in Political Ambition

• In Event: Experimental Methods and Gender Research

Abstract

Women’s under-representation in U.S. politics is an empirical fact. The U.S. ranks 95th in the world in the percentage of women serving in the national legislature. While key features of the electoral system in the U.S. certainly help explain the paucity of elected women, researchers have identified the persistent gender gap in political ambition as a key reason. Among well-situated individuals, those from the professions most likely to precede a career in politics, women are significantly less likely to consider a career in politics than their male counterparts. Research to date has focused primarily on explaining the gender gap in political ambition by identifying factors such as self-assessed qualifications, risk aversion, and competitiveness. Still little is known about the degree of gender differences in ambition to run for office and investigators have only just begun to assess what types of messages and incentives may help to close the gender gap in ambition.

In this study we make two substantial advances on the existing literature: 1) we are the first to examine the extent of the gender gap in political ambition and variance of preferences across gender, and 2) we employ gender-targeted messages based on prior survey evidence to test which kinds of appeals may reduce or eliminate the gender gap.

To study the gap in political ambition, we designed a laboratory experiment that builds upon prior experimental work examining gender differences in both overconfidence and preferences towards competitive environments, including those with electoral components (Healy and Pate, 2011 and Kanthak and Woon, 2015). We use an addition task paid piece-rate where a portion of the payment is based on an individual’s performance and a portion is based on the performance of a designated group representative. Subjects complete the addition task across a series of stages, including one where subjects indicate their willingness to volunteer to be the representative, and a stage that replicates a standard electoral environment where subjects must “campaign” in order to be the representative.
The experimental design allows us to examine how an individual’s willingness to serve as a group representative varies across different selection environments: non-competitive (volunteering) and competitive (running for election). Our design features a continuous elicitation measure that provides a more fine-tuned measurement of the degree to which women and men exhibit electoral aversion. We also test several treatment variations with messages aimed at priming behavior in an attempt to close the gender gap in political ambition.

We conducted thirteen experimental sessions with 260 subjects. The empirical results show that although men and women are equally likely to indicate a willingness to be the group representative, when asked their willingness to stand as a candidate in an election, men's willingness increases by 5 percent, while women's willingness falls 20 percent. Considering within-subject pairwise comparisons, women are also significantly more likely to shift from being "more willing" (willingness of 6 or higher) to "less willing" (willingness of 4 or lower) than men when an election is involved.

However, when subjects were primed with a message in advance of their decision to run in the election (for example, a message that appeals to one’s community spirit and helping others), women were equally likely to participate in both the non-competitive and competitive environments (the same message had no significant impact on men). Our findings demonstrate that gender-targeted messaging may be the solution to reducing the gender gap in political ambition.

Authors

• Jennifer Pate, Loyola Marymount University

• Richard L. Fox, Loyola Marymount University