28 March 2008
World Needs More Women Holding Public Offices, Expert Says
Campaign training for women is helping to change the face of politics
Washington -- The best thing a woman can do is run for public office, says Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University.
Women in power help enrich democratic government and shatter stereotypes, according to the award-winning author, who has written and spoken extensively on African-American political thought.
Harris-Lacewell made her case before more than 100 women who had gathered March 14 at Rutgers, New Jersey’s state university, to learn more about running for elected offices or winning appointments to government positions. They were enrolled in programs aimed at minority women as part of the Ready to Run: Campaign Training for Women program offered each year by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers.
Ready to Run was born 10 years ago, when CAWP, which keeps track of how many women hold political office in the United States, found that New Jersey was consistently ranking among the bottom 10 states for the number of women holding state offices.
The program seems to have helped: New Jersey has moved up to 15th in the country for the proportion of women in its state legislature. Many of the elected women are alumnae of Ready to Run, according to the program’s coordinators.
In addition, CAWP runs special one-day programs aimed specifically at Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American women.
WHY WOMEN DON’T RUN
Cultural norms and structural barriers deter many women from considering a career in politics, Harris-Lacewell said in a keynote address at the 2008 Ready to Run program.
“Women tend to help men get elected but don’t run themselves,” she observed.
Women can be deterred from seeking office for themselves by the amount of money they need to raise to run a political campaign, the time it will take away from their families and the sometimes unpleasant, “un-ladylike” battles they may have to wage against their opponents, Harris-Lacewell said. Women candidates, she cautioned, have to guard against negative campaigning, which alienates voters and ultimately hurts the female in the race.
Voter sexism and socially constructed perceptions of “how things should be” also work against women seeking leadership positions, Harris-Lacewell said. “Women must motivate voters to resolve the ‘cognitive dissonance’” regarding powerful women, she said.
WHY WOMEN SHOULD RUN
The only way to change public perceptions of what women “should” be doing in the world of politics, Harris-Lacewell said, is for women to seek and win public office in greater numbers. Elected and appointed women officials, she said, “alter the minds of both men and women.”
“Women govern differently on average than men,” she said. “Women are more focused on policies reflecting women’s life experiences. ... They employ more consensus techniques.”
Even if there were no differences in the leadership styles of men and women, it is important to have women leaders, she said.
“Democracies work best when they draw from the deepest possible well of knowledge and ability among its citizens,” Harris-Lacewell said. “Women,” she said, “are human. We should be able to express the full range of our desires, skills and capabilities.” This, she said, is “the capacity of democracy.”
Pointing to her young daughter sitting in the audience, Harris-Lacewell emphasized an even more important reason women should strive for leadership positions: “Our daughters deserve worlds that are wide open to them.”
CAMPAIGN TRAINING WITH A DIFFERENCE
Although Ready to Run is aimed at women in New Jersey, women from other states also attend, according to Jean Sinzdak, project manager for the Program for Women Public Officials at CAWP.
“The great thing we love about Ready to Run,” Sinzdak told America.gov, is that it’s nonpartisan; it’s not tied to a particular policy stand.”
Sinzdak said that even though there are many “wonderful” campaign training programs around the United States, they typically are aimed at Democrats or Republicans or women with specific policy beliefs, such as being for or against abortion.
Sinzdak’s long-term vision is to bring Ready to Run to states around the country, especially the programs aimed at minority women. “We need to at least bring the idea of political participation and getting involved in public life to different communities,” she said.
For additional information, see “Latina Women Expand Political Involvement in the United States” and “Asian-American Women Dip Their Toes into U.S. Politics.”
See also the publication Women In Politics.
