Gender, risk assessment, and political ambition

Abstract

ABSTRACT. In the United States, women have long held the right to vote and can participate fully in the political process, and yet they are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. Worldwide, men's dominance in the realm of politics has also been the norm. To date, scholars have focused on supply-side and demand-side explanations of women's underrepresentation but differences in how men and women assess electoral risk (the risk involved in seeking political office) are not fully explained. To fill this gap, I explore how evolutionary theory offers insights into gendered differences in political ambition and the evaluation of electoral risk. Using the framework of life-history theory, I hypothesize that both cognitive and environmental factors in human evolution, particularly as they relate to sexual selection and social roles, have shaped the psychology of ambition in gendered ways affecting contemporary politics. Cognitive risk-assessment mechanisms evolving in the hominid line came to be expressed differently in females and males, in women and men. These gendered expressions plausibly reflect differentiable environmental pressures in the past and may help explain behaviors in and barriers to women's electoral political activity in the present. If so, then the success of efforts to increase such activity -or, regressively, to suppress it -may be better understood.Key words: Political ambition, gender differences, evolutionary theory, electoral risk assessment M ale officeholders are the norm in political representation both worldwide and in the United States in particular. Across the globe, gender parity in political representation is unusual, and instances of women's overrepresentation are extremely rare. 1 In the United States, women make up slightly more than half of the population and earned the right to vote and participate fully in the political process many decades ago. Nevertheless, in recent U.S. history, less than a quarter of state legislators have been women; women have held few state executive offices; and women have comprised less than 20 percent of the membership of the U.S. Congress. 2 Proponents of greater gender equality in U.S. political representation continue to wonder why more women do not run for or hold political office when so many of the societal and structural barriers to their participation have diminished. The leading explanations tend to focus on candidate emergence and cultural doi: 10.1017/pls.2016.13Correspondence: Jennie Sweet-Cushman, Department of History, Political Science, and International Studies, Chatham University, 0 Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15232. Email: jsweetcushman@chatham.edu and psychological factors that contribute to men and women having different levels of political ambition. 3,4 However, these theories do not address what I consider to be critical questions: What role does electoral risk play in political ambition, and can evolutionary theory provide insight into gendered differences in risk assessment and political ambition? I argue that the ...

Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary–Developmental Origins

“…Psychological sex differences, such as men's higher risktaking, systemizing, and things orientation-and women's higher fearfulness, empathizing, and people orientation-have been reported in a variety of domains (Geary, 2010;Christov-Moore et al, 2014;Varella et al, 2016;Greenberg et al, 2018;Archer, 2019;Luoto, 2020), and may be instrumental in decision-making in a high-pressure leadership context (Sweet-Cushman, 2016). The multivariate space of personality differences between men and women has been measured as D = 2.71 (in a US sample), corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between male and female personality profiles, assuming statistical normality (Del Giudice et al, 2012).…”

Running Local: Gender Stereotyping and Female Candidates in Local Elections

“…An alternative perspective argues that feminine stereotype benefits female candidates when issues that fit into the stereotypic strengths of women dominate the electoral agenda (Deckman 2007; Kahn 1994; Rosenwasser and Dean 1989; Sweet-Cushman 2016; Windett 2014). As Windett (2014, p. 629) explains, “[female] candidates may be successful when running for lower legislative offices with issue priorities that line up with their respective gender stereotypes.” The 1992 election, famously dubbed the “Year of the Woman,” saw an increase in women running for and winning elected office because issues about sexual harassment and the exclusion of women from channels of political power were dominant campaign themes (Dolan 1998; Williams 1998).…”

“…The literature on female candidates and gender stereotypes argues that feminine stereotypes advantage female candidates running in local elections because the issues and responsibilities of local officeholders align with the stereotypic strengths of women (Atkeson and Krebs 2008; Deckman 2007; Kahn 1994; Richardson and Freeman 1995; Rosenwasser and Dean 1989; Sweet-Cushman 2016; Thomas 1994; Windett 2014). An alternative perspective argues that feminine stereotypes, because they do not match the masculine expectations voters hold for political leaders (Conroy 2015; Holman, Merolla, and Zechmeister 2016), hinder the electoral success of female candidates (Bos, Schneider, and Utz 2017; Bauer 2015a, 2015b; Ditonto 2017; Huddy and Terkildsen 1993a, 1993b).…”

An Experimental Examination of Demand-Side Preferences for Female and Male National Leaders

“…Scholars offer a number of explanations for the imbalance in females and males in political leadership attainment. Broadly speaking, the explanations can be categorized as supply- and demand-side factors ( Sweet-Cushman, 2016 ). Leading supply side factors, which affect the number of female candidates willing to run, include the lack of female role models at elite levels of professional life (e.g., Mansbridge, 1999 ; Campbell and Wolbrecht, 2006 ), differential political ambition (e.g., Fox and Lawless, 2004 ; see also Campbell, 1999 ), and family role commitments (e.g., Sapiro, 1982 ; Fulton et al, 2006 ), which include biological factors related to sexual reproduction (gestation and lactation; Brown, 1991 ; Low, 1992 ; Campbell, 1999 , 2013 ; Benenson, 2013 ; Garfield et al, 2019 ).…”

“… 1 While this article focuses on the demand for female versus male candidates, Sweet-Cushman (2016) argues evolutionary forces also affect the relative supply of female versus male candidates via differential sexual selection pressures related to the risk of running for and holding elective office. Other scholars take a broader but related approach suggesting females receive different if not smaller relative benefits from gaining status in a social hierarchy (e.g., Campbell, 1999 ) and likely have different measures of social status (e.g., Benenson, 1999 ).…”