She Won’t Let Us Down: Women’s Executive Advantage Under Political Crisis

• In Event: Women as Stewards of the Public Trust: Empirics or Essentialism?

Abstract

In 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became the first female prime minister of Iceland, following a period of economic turmoil and fourteen weeks of protests over the government’s response to the global financial crisis. How did this (inter)national calamity affect Sigurðardóttir’s bid for office? Recent scholarship has suggested that women are more likely to achieve leadership positions during times of crisis, a phenomenon known as the glass cliff. Most previous research has concentrated on female executives in the business sector, or in legislative political races where gendered qualities such as “leadership” may not be as salient. This paper instead examines the glass cliff with respect to women’s bids for executive political office. Using an original dataset, it finds that women are indeed more likely to achieve both elected and appointed executive political office during or following economic and security crises, personal scandals of outgoing male executives, and party conflicts. Interestingly, women do not hold any advantage during or after grave natural disasters (e.g. Haiti following its historic earthquake of 2010).

The glass cliff literature is also largely descriptive, and does not specify the mechanism(s) through which women hold an advantage during crisis. This paper demonstrates this effect is due to hypercompetence among the women who reach the upper echelons of political office. That is, female politicians are more attractive during or following crisis because they are of higher quality than most of their male counterparts, having had to perform “backwards and in heels” to achieve the same positions. One robust finding in the gender and politics literature is that when women run for political office, they win at the same rate as men. This is not because there is no disadvantage to being a female candidate. Rather, the women who decide to run and successfully achieve office are by necessity of a higher caliber than their male counterparts. I argue that during times of crisis, this makes women more attractive than men to lead, both because they are more likely to be high quality, and because they have less room to fail than men. These findings have important implications for women’s path towards achieving parity with men in executive political office, if they are only thrust forward during times of national crisis. Furthermore, this means female executives may be inaccurately deemed less successful than male executives, given that their performance is assessed under more challenging conditions.

Author

• Dayna Judge, Princeton University