Our Own Glass Ceilings

The Washington Post
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, May 28, 2008; A13

As Hillary Clinton cracks her head against what she likes to call "the highest and hardest glass ceiling," there's no doubt that she craves the presidency as much as any man does.
But a new report from the Brookings Institution suggests an unexpected reason for the relative paucity of women elsewhere in political office and the dearth of credible female presidential candidates: an ambition gap.
"Somewhat surprisingly," write political scientists Jennifer Lawless of Brown University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount, women's underrepresentation "is not because of discrimination against women candidates. In fact, women perform as well as men when they do run for office. In terms of fundraising and vote totals, the consensus among researchers is the complete absence of overt gender bias."
Rather, the "fundamental reason for women's underrepresentation is that they do not run for office. There is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it, and women don't."
Surveying thousands of business leaders, educators and political activists, Lawless and Fox found "clear and compelling evidence that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elected office." These results held true regardless of age, partisan affiliation, income and profession.
Equally unsettling, they note, this ambition gap is not shrinking. The number of women seeking political office grew steadily during the 1980s, and surged in the early 1990s -- remember the Year of the Woman? -- but has since leveled off. Today, women account for fewer than one out of four elected statewide officials, one in six members of Congress, and -- perhaps most relevant considering the traditional road to the presidency -- eight of 50 governors.
Why this reluctance to take the political plunge? "Women are less likely than men to be willing to endure the rigors of a political campaign," Lawless and Fox write. "They are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to have the freedom to reconcile work and family obligations with a political career. They are less likely than men to think they are 'qualified' to run for office."
Oh, boy -- oh, girl?-- does that ring true.
The women in the survey were far less likely to be married or have children than the men were, and those who did had their hands full: 60 percent of the women, compared with 4 percent of the men, said they were responsible for the majority of child care.
As Beloit College political scientist Georgia Duerst-Lahti put it, "Women may now think about running for office, but they probably think about it while they are making the bed." Chugging down the Mommy Track may leave little time for pursuing a third, often all-consuming career.
The ambition gap also reflected an underlying, and pronounced, cockiness gap. One-third of men, but just one in five women, rated themselves "very qualified" to hold political office; twice as many women (12 percent) as men (6 percent) considered themselves "not at all qualified." Men were more likely to try for federal office, women for the local school board. Nearly half the women, but fewer than a third of the men, said they did not "have thick enough skin" to run.
Those responses resonated with my own experiences. Becoming a parent tempered my career ambitions in ways I never anticipated. There are jobs I once wanted -- jobs I'd be good at, actually -- that now I would not pursue. [To read the entire article, go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/27/AR2008052702557_pf.html ]
marcusr@washpost.com