Episode 15
· 42:38
The reality is that all of the evidence from political science would suggest that women are actually better political leaders than men. Generally, women wait until they are more qualified and have more resources and have more connections and have done 2 or 3 times the amount of training before they run for political office.
Carmina Ravanera:In Canada, only 30% of members of parliament are women. And only 16% belong to a racial minority group well below their 26% representation in the overall Canadian population. On the other hand, white men are overrepresented in political leadership. And that's not only the case in Canada, but in many other countries as well. People may consciously or subconsciously think that that's because women, racialized folks, and members of other underrepresented groups just don't make good political leaders. How many times have you heard the sexist trope that women are too emotional to be in politics, or too nice?
Carmina Ravanera:And that's just part of the problem. The reality is that there are a lot of factors contributing to the political underrepresentation we see today. In this episode, we're going to be busting the myth that women and members of other underrepresented groups just aren't suited to political leadership. I'm Carmina Ravenara, senior research associate at GATE.
Sonia Kang:And I'm Dr. Sonya Kang, Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion and academic director at GATE. I'm excited to bust this myth today. Our political leaders have so much influence over all kinds of decisions that affect our daily lives. If we had more representative political leadership, our world could look very different than it does now. So as always, let's start with the research.
Sonia Kang:What does the research say about why women are underrepresented in politics?
Carmina Ravanera:Okay. Well, first of all, the question of who makes it into political leadership is decided well before the ballot box. I talked to Dr. Mirya Holman, an associate professor at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. She and her team study a phenomenon that they call gendered political socialization. Basically, they find that people's interest in going into politics is influenced from a really young age.
Mirya Holman:My colleagues and I, we set out to try to understand, first of all, whether or not there exists a gender gap in political interest among younger children. So there's a well documented gap, between adults, men and women in political ambition. For example, men are much more likely to say that they're interested in running for political office, and they're more likely to actually run for political office. And this is a really persistent and consistent gap. So we've seen it sort of time and again across studies.
Mirya Holman:And so we're like, well, where where does this start? What's what are the origins of this? And so we, set out to understand what kids think about politics. And so we surveyed or interviewed, just over 1600, children in grade school. So from 1st to 6th grade, ages, like, 6 to 12, essentially.
Mirya Holman:And, we asked them to do a couple of things. The first thing that we asked all the kids to do was, we gave them a blank sheet, and we said and we gave them, crayons of lots of different colors. And we said, could you draw us a picture of a political leader? Close your eyes and think about what you see when you see a picture of a political leader. And they drew images for us, and these images are very entertaining as you might guess.
Mirya Holman:Kids have lots of ideas about what political leaders look like. But one of the things that we found was that among the youngest children, girls are really likely to draw women as political leaders. But as we looked across the ages and as we looked at the older and older children, girls were less and less likely to draw women as political leaders and more and more likely to draw men as political leaders. And we argue that this represents, gender political socialization process that children go through. So this is sort of a combination of 2 different processes that are happening at the same time.
Mirya Holman:One process is that people, that children, are learning about gender as they age. And so you can think about lots of ways that kids learn about gender. They learn it from their peers. They learn it from their parents. They learn it from television shows, from all sorts of media, from dolls, from toys, from outfits.
Mirya Holman:And this is really well documented by psychologists and educational researchers that kids during grade school are really, like, learning how to perform perform their gender. They're learning what the rules are about being a boy or being a girl. So we know that that's happening. We also know that at the same time, kids are learning about the political system. And, they're learning what the rules of the game are about our our our political systems and how they operate.
Mirya Holman:And so that includes things like learning the basics. There's a president. There is a congress. What voting is? How voting works?
Mirya Holman:They probably are also learning what their parents' political preferences are during this time, and they might be learning positive things about one political party or negative things about another political party. And in another set of research, we show that this is happening a lot too during this time, that kids are really developing positive and negative feelings towards the parties. But we think that these two things are happening at the same time. This gender and political social, this gender socialization, and this political socialization. And part of what girls are learning during this time as they learn about the political system is that there's not a lot of evidence that girls participate or belong in the political system.
Mirya Holman:And so all of the presidents that they learn about are men. And when they learn about their own representatives, they're probably learning about men. And when they learn about important people in the history of politics, they're learning about men. And this teaches them that one of the rules of the game is that politics is a space where men belong and not necessarily where women belong. And instead, women belong in spaces like being teachers or being nurses where they see a lot of representation of women and women doing things that they think are important and interesting.
Mirya Holman:So these two processes are occurring, and it's really teaching girls during their early ages of learning about our our political systems that they don't have a space for themselves in those political systems.
Sonia Kang:So this research shows that society's preference for men as political leaders is socialized quite early on. By the age of 12, girls are more likely to think of men and traits associated with men as representative of political leadership. As she says, we're socialized into these preferences based on what we see around us. So it's not about whether women are good leaders or not. It's about how people are socialized to perceive them as poor leaders.
Sonia Kang:These misconceptions are formed long before we become adults.
Carmina Ravanera:Right. And by the time candidates are running for an election, biases about who belongs in politics are already solidified. Another researcher I talked to, Dr. Erin Tolley, is the Canada Research Chair in Gender, Race, and Inclusive Politics at Carleton University. She and her team did a study on how people assess women and men who are candidates for mayoral positions. This was super interesting because people often think of municipal politics as being more open to women.
Carmina Ravanera:Unfortunately, her team found that that isn't necessarily the case.
Erin Tolley:We started that study motivated by a bit of a puzzle. And that puzzle was on the one hand, local politics is viewed as communal, closer to home, and more closely oriented with women's policy issues. From that perspective, you would think that municipal government would be more hospitable to women candidates. But on the other hand, we know that voters typically understand good leadership in masculine terms. Men are stereotyped to be more capable, more competent, more qualified, and also more likable political candidates.
Erin Tolley:So men are viewed as better able to make decisions, work with other politicians, and provide leadership. A lot of the research on municipal politics looks at council level elections, and then most of the research on political leadership looks at the national level. So our study really wanted to understand how gender shapes understandings of political leadership at the municipal level, at this level that is, purportedly most open to women. One thing that's really clear even when you look at the local level and especially when you look at mayors is that candidates are still overwhelmingly male. So there's a study of elections in Canada's a 100 largest cities that found that just 16% of candidates for mayor were women.
Erin Tolley:And in 44 of those elections in Canada's 100 largest cities, there wasn't a single women candidate running for mayor. So, you know, even at the level of government that's perceived to be the most open to women, the most prominent, prestigious, and powerful position, the mayor's office, is essentially a men's club. So all of this, you know, made us wonder how voters understand leadership in mayoral elections. And we specifically asked whether the women who seek the mayor's office benefit from a boost because they are seen as naturally suited to local politics, or if they suffer from a backlash because they are believed to lack the necessary competence as leaders. So to answer that question, we use data from the Canada Municipal Election Study, which was conducted in 2017 and 2018 during municipal elections in 8 Canadian cities.
Erin Tolley:More than 14,000 people responded to that survey and we think it's the largest survey of municipal voters anywhere. This survey had an interesting feature. It included 2 open ended questions. So text boxes really, where respondents could type in what they liked and disliked about the mayoral candidates that were running in their cities. Our hunch was that these candidate assessments would be shaped by stereotypes about masculinity and femininity.
Erin Tolley:That's really what gender role theory predicts. People tend to think of certain professions, nursing or early childhood education, for example, as women's work and other careers like construction or firefighting as men's work. Those ideas also shape how we understand the world around us and also how we evaluate political leaders. So past research shows that we think of policy domains in a gendered way. Certain policy issues are considered to be more masculine, like finance or defense or business.
Erin Tolley:Others like arts or culture or social policy are viewed as more more feminine, and we call these issue stereotypes. Traits and behaviors are also gendered. We often think of crying or being nice as more feminine traits, while those like, you know, physical strength or rationality are thought to be more masculine. So those are trait stereotypes. So our project drew on this past research to categorize respondents' comments and to compare how masculine and feminine issue and trait stereotypes shape assessments of the men and women who run for office.
Erin Tolley:We found overall that women candidates are described in significantly more negative terms than their male opponents. But a bit to our surprise and contrary to what we expected, women candidates don't receive more positive issue evaluations from from voters. We had expected women candidates to benefit from stereotypes about their competence in the policy issues that are associated with local government and especially those that are perceived as more feminine, but that's not the case. Voters also have more negative assessments of women candidates, and especially when it comes to their traits and behavior. So the title of the paper is drawn from some of these comments.
Erin Tolley:You know, whiny, fake, and I don't like her hair were some of the milder comments that that respondents made about women candidates. They made reference to women candidates' voices, their perceived flakiness and, aspects of their bodies.
Carmina Ravanera:And people might just think, okay, so women can avoid these negative assessments by acting more masculine. Right? Not so much. Erin explained that that approach doesn't work either.
Erin Tolley:One thing is that women candidates will admit they're aware that voters associate femininity with weakness or an unsuitability for political office. And so many of these candidates adopt strategies to overcome that that stereotype. They'll wear pantsuits, they lower their voices, they try to keep their emotions in check. So Valerie Plante, who's now the mayor of Montreal, she took a cheeky approach to this in her campaign advertising when she first ran for mayor. The photograph featured her in a in a gray suit, her arms crossed, and the tagline "l'homme de la situation", which loosely translated as the right man for the job.
Erin Tolley:And this is often referred to as a trait balancing strategy. Our findings show though that when women candidates attempt to highlight the masculine traits that voters associate with leaders, voters actually punish them with negative evaluations. This puts women candidates in a, in a real bind. If they act like women, then voters will see them as flawed leaders. But if they act the way that many voters understand, leadership, to be, you know, tough, fearless, tenacious, then the candidates will be viewed as flawed women.
Erin Tolley:So it's really the kind of catch 22 of of political candidacy. You know, women candidates receive no boost from their perceived competence in local policy issues, and what's worse is they experience a backlash when they display the traits that voters typically associate with strong leaders. So even at the level of government that's frequently thought of as most open to women, there's an enduring association between masculinity and and political leadership, and this ultimately shapes how voters assess candidates.
Sonia Kang:So we associate political leadership with men, and we learn to do that from childhood. Then when it comes time to vote, we not only value men, but also value masculine traits, but only if it's a man who's showcasing them. People don't like it when women display those masculine traits. This is the double bind faced by women across so many professional spaces. Either you're too nice and, therefore, not strong or serious enough to be a good leader, or you're too strong and too serious, in which case people think you're cold and unlikeable.
Sonia Kang:And not only that, even though there are policy areas that are perceived as women's issues, like arts or culture, those gendered stereotypes don't advantage women who are running for mayor. So it seems like they can't win.
Carmina Ravanera:And it's not all men who are seen as ideal politicians, but white men in particular. Erin emphasized how we have to think intersectionally when trying to understand these biases.
Erin Tolley:Definitely there are race, gender, and intersectional effects. Women experience politics differently than men, and racialized Canadians experience politics differently than white Canadians. But racialized women have different political trajectories than white women, as do racialized men and racialized women. So anytime we talk about women in politics, it's really important to ask which women. There isn't a uniform experience within these sort of macro categories because a lot of our work in this area has universalized the outcomes of white women and understood it as a proxy for all women or often even all numerically underrepresented groups.
Erin Tolley:So there's research that says if you wanna understand the outcomes of historically, of marginalized groups in politics, you just need to look at the case of of women, and and that's a problem because the patterns and therefore the solutions for fixing it are gonna vary depending on race and gender. We have to understand these groups, in different ways, and we have to understand them, intersectionally.
Sonia Kang:Right. White women are often the group people pay attention to when talking about more diversity in politics, but that's unhelpful for the many different marginalized groups, including racialized men and women who are left out of the conversation.
Carmina Ravanera:So we've talked about childhood socialization and how that can end up shaping who people vote for in adulthood. But Erin also mentioned that these biases against women and racialized folks play out within parties themselves. For example, in terms of the candidates they choose to put forward, which influences the choices we have during elections.
Erin Tolley:The first thing is to think, you know, if you're gonna ask a sample of Canadians why women and racialized Canadians are underrepresented in elected institutions, I think many would point the finger at at voters. The working assumption would be that voters are biased. They don't wanna vote for women or or racialized candidates. This isn't a bad assumption. I mean, certainly our research on municipal elections showed that voters do have biases, lots of them.
Erin Tolley:You know? They wrote them into our survey. And those biases are especially top of mind in municipal elections because in most Canadian cities, political parties are generally absent from those elections. They don't really play a role in municipal politics, And that's important because in municipal elections, voters can't draw on party labels to help them make their choice at the ballot box, and that's why municipal voters may be especially likely to draw on individual stereotypes. That helps them understand candidate choices.
Erin Tolley:They don't have party labels to draw on, so they think about other things. But federally and provincially, it's different. Parties do have a role, and in in fact, voter stereotypes about parties are what underpin most of their electoral decision making at these levels of government. So it's different than in municipal politics. So in these elections where parties do play a role, most research finds that for all but a few of the sort of most hardened, you know, discriminatory, voters, party preference overrides nearly all other considerations, including stereotypes about about race and and gender.
Erin Tolley:So when you're trying to understand electoral underrepresentation in federal and provincial politics in Canada, parties are a crucial part of the of the picture. You know, Canadian politics is party politics. And so it's really important to think about parties. And and the reason, you know, that you kind of bring together this research on on stereotypes and political parties is that parties are made up of people. These are the same people whose ideas about leadership are shaped by stereotypes, about masculinity and femininity.
Erin Tolley:They're bringing their own assumptions and biases, to their decision making within the party unit. So it's party elites, party leaders who set rules about candidate selection, and they can use those rules, they can leverage them to make the path into politics easier for some political candidates and more challenging for others. So the rules are not, you know, always applied in in, completely, fair ways. And it's party members who identify prospective candidates. They'll encourage or discourage them from running, and ultimately, it's party members who decide who is going to be the party's candidate in each of the country's electoral districts.
Erin Tolley:And they don't make these choices from a purely objective standpoint. Their choices are shaped by their understanding of what constitutes a good candidate, or their past experiences of success or failure. And those choices are also shaped by their networks, and who they come across, in their day to day life, and and that can influence who they will recruit to run. So research, you know, it shows even though voters aren't systematically biased against women and racialized candidates, party elites, in fact, believe they are. They think voters, might vote against women and racialized candidates, and that makes parties underestimate those candidates' electoral prospects. So it makes parties, gun shy.
Erin Tolley:They're worried they might lose, if they run, you know, too many women and racialized candidates or they, run them in, districts where voters might not be open to them. And so that can make parties hesitant about running more diverse candidates period or to pigeonhole them into certain types of districts. So that's why research shows that parties are more likely to run women and racialized candidates in districts where the party has very little hope of winning. The party knows it needs to advance some diversity on its candidate slates, but it's worried about doing that in the districts that really matter to the party, and this is why women, and racialized candidates are often referred to as sacrificial lambs. They're sort of put up to sacrifice by the party.
Erin Tolley:And it's also why women and racialized, candidates are much more likely to emerge in districts where the president of the local electoral district association is a woman or is racialized. Those party members not only have networks that give them access to more diverse candidates, but they are also more likely to believe in those candidates' capability and encourage women and racialized candidates to run. So those assumptions about what constitutes a good candidate and the sort of strength of the networks, the diversity of the networks that parties have access to, can really shape, which candidates emerge and also the electoral prospects that they will face when they ultimately become candidates. So parties really are a key part of that equation.
Sonia Kang:Interesting. Political parties have such a central and reinforcing role in all of this. They assume that voters are less likely to choose women and racial minorities, so they put those candidates in areas where they're likely to lose. And that happens despite research that suggests that voters' party preferences matter more than gender and racial stereotypes.
Carmina Ravanera:Basically, we can see how many different factors contribute to the underrepresentation of women and other marginalized groups in politics. And none of those factors have anything to do with the quality of candidates.
Sonia Kang:This paints a pretty bleak picture for creating more representative governments. What did our experts say about the implications of their research? What needs to change to make our political systems more equitable?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, both of our experts highlight important structural changes in the way we teach about politics and the way politics even works.
Mirya Holman:Well, you know, one of the challenges that that we often think about associated with this gender gap, right? Or the lack of gender parity in political office is like, okay. What can we do about it? Alright. If we if we don't if women are capable political leaders, but they're just not interested in being political leaders.
Mirya Holman:Are are there ways that we could solve this problem? And often, the solution is a sort of version of lean in. Like, women just need to put themselves out there. Like, if we just, like if women would just, like, wise up and realize that they they make good political leaders, they they could just compete. And then we would have all the political leaders that are women that we need.
Mirya Holman:But our research suggests that the origins of this are are really deeply rooted. Right? And it's not it's not something that is gonna be just cured by me saying, Carmina, why don't you just run for office? Like, just run for office. You should you'd be great at it.
Mirya Holman:Just run for office. Maybe if I say it three times, right, it will it will be effective on you. And so, you know, if if this is deeply rooted in sort of how people are categorizing and understanding and learning about the political system at an early age, then providing solutions are gonna need to be far more broad reaching than just, like, trying to convince the few successful women that you know that they should run for political office. There's also this deep problem that one of the sort of things that we identify as a source of this is the way that we teach about social science. And that is largely, a heroes and myths version of social science.
Mirya Holman:Right? So if you think about how how kids learn about the political system, they learn about individuals who are these great men, and they're mostly great they're mostly men who have done these very cool things. But if we structure our entire curriculum around the idea that, like, let's talk about this one person as the example for how this happens, and all of our examples from the past are men, then it's just reinforcing over and over again that the political system is a is a space for men and not necessarily for women. Women's lives in the United States, in Canada, in in all industrialized countries have changed really dramatically in the last 50 years in terms of access to work, access to rights, access to health care, the ability to control your own destiny. But some of the things that are the most sticky are these socialized gender roles that start very early on in life.
Mirya Holman:And that's because they're reinforced through internal and external rewards and punishments. Right? So as we engage with other people, people reinforce positively us acting in accordance with our gender and punish us for not acting in accordance with our gender and vice versa. Right? If if little girls act like boys, then they are punished for that.
Mirya Holman:And if little boys act like act in ways that we think are consistent with with being a girl, they're punished for that. And so it's very difficult to intervene in something that is all around us. Right? It's sort of like saying, like, well, what if we just change the air that we breathe? What if we just changed everything about how society is structured, and then that would make it better for for girls.
Mirya Holman:We do think that if we if we were a bit more careful about the kinds of lessons that we give about politics, it might be useful. Right? So thinking about the ways that we describe, for example, the history of a country and making it not just about these 5 guys that everybody knows about. For example, in our images of the the children drew, there are more Abraham Lincolns than there are women drawn by by the older kids. Right?
Mirya Holman:So, like, the kids are learning about Abraham Lincoln, who was a great man and was very important. But in doing so, that image of Abraham Lincoln as a man sort of overwhelms all other pieces of information about what political leadership means. So thinking about the kinds of of examples that we give to children, it is very hard though because kids are not just learning from their curriculum about politics. They're also learning from their parents talking about politics and their friends talking about politics and media and news and newspaper covers. And it turns out every child knows who the president of the United States is.
Mirya Holman:Right? So all of these things are really challenging because it's, again, sort of like trying it's all around us. And trying to intervene is very difficult.
Erin Tolley:The main takeaway for me is that politics is not a neutral space. The rules, norms, and processes that shape elections and political institutions, all of these were crafted by and for propertied white men. You can't get away from that. There has been some evolution, some progress, some changes, but political life is still very strongly rooted in the past and the in these kind of older ideas. You see this in the adversarial nature of the House of Commons.
Erin Tolley:You know, on the one side is the government, on the other side is the opposition, and the 2 are divided by a corridor exactly equal to 2 sword lengths. This doesn't really scream community. It it really screams, you know, adversary, and this structures the way, that people are expected to practice politics, the discourse in politics, and our ideas about what constitutes an effective politician. And some of that is grounded in really masculinized assumptions about leadership. But despite this, a lot of the work on under representation and politics adopts a perspective that suggests if a group is underrepresented in politics, it's because they are deficient in some way.
Erin Tolley:So we have campaign schools and advice to lean in and all of this stuff that suggests women and racialized Canadians are to blame for their own absence in politics. What this diagnosis misses though is the structure of the institutions themselves. Those institutions at best were not designed for women and racialized Canadians, and at worst are hostile to them. So I think we need to pay a lot more attention to institutional design and and just a way that we understand and practice politics.
Sonia Kang:Right. So if this lack of representation is rooted in socialization processes that start from childhood, the solutions really need to start there as well. And we need to stop accepting that politics needs to be so divided and adversarial. Accepting that premise can lead us to value masculine traits. Instead, we need to innovate strategies for leading and creating policy that are based in community and representation.
Carmina Ravanera:And research also shows that there are changes that can be made to our political systems that would make them more representative. This won't necessarily change deep rooted biases directly, but it can change political outcomes and slowly start to undo those biases. I spoke to Dr. Kristen Duke, who's an assistant professor of marketing here at the University of Toronto's Rotman School, about one of her research projects in this area.
Kristen Duke:So we were really interested in this big problem of countries like Canada, the US, and many around the world having this history of elected officials not demographically reflecting the population. There are lots of different barriers to representation of women and of people of color, and other minority groups. But one that we were most interested in is this idea of electability. So electability is this term that gets thrown around, but it basically just means your beliefs of how likely it is that someone can win an election. So we started out by just looking at a historical analysis of the New York Times archive of how they've used the term electable or electability in articles over time.
Kristen Duke:And basically, you see a few uses back in the seventies, and then a huge spike in 2008 when Barack Obama ran for president. And of course, this is the first time that there was a Black nominee from a major party in the United States for president. And then the 2nd most common usage was in 2020 when we had this big slate of demographically diverse candidates running for the first time. So we wanted to see if people have these worries that people of color and women in particular are, quote unquote, unelectable or face higher electability concerns. And whether the electoral system itself might be contributing to that problem.
Kristen Duke:So we look at the classic single choice voting system that countries like the US and Canada use where, they use a first past the post system whereby they essentially just calculate how many votes each candidate gets and the person who gets the highest number of votes wins. And this system, essentially, it has a few different problems, but one of them is that people might be worried that their candidate they really like and they most prefer doesn't stand a chance against the competition. And therefore, it doesn't make sense to waste your vote, so to speak. And we have heard about this alternative electoral system, known as ranked choice voting, and instant runoff voting in particular, where that might not be the case. Where essentially people might be less worried about their candidates' electability concerns and might be more willing to vote for them.
Kristen Duke:Ranked choice voting and other systems like it should allow people to essentially hedge and be less worried about wasting their vote, so to speak, on someone who faces higher electability concerns. So for example, the way that instant runoff voting, which is the most popular form of ranked choice voting, works, is people can rank candidates in order of their preference. And then if one, if no candidate receives a majority of votes, so if nobody exceeds 50%, then the least popular candidate is eliminated and anyone who had voted for that candidate gets their votes reallocated to our 2nd choice. And then it's recalculated. So essentially it allows people to have a backup plan and to hedge.
Kristen Duke:But there's been a lot of discussion over whether people actually recognize this. So we wanted to see if everyday regular voters recognize the potential of ranked choice voting to allow them to be less worried about electability and then ultimately whether that could translate into them being more willing to vote for people who are seen as less electable. So that's what we decided to test in a series of studies. So in our first study, we just confirmed our suspicions and results that are consistent with prior research where voters rated, faces of US mayors from large cities. And they rated women and people of color as facing higher electability concerns.
Kristen Duke:So these white male mayors were rated as having the least electability concerns, which, it's consistent with prior research, but particularly frustrating because all of those people had won their elections. They were successfully elected mayors. So having seen this ourselves that people do see these underrepresented candidates as facing higher electability concerns, we next wanted to test if that voting system, if the format of ranking versus singular choice might change how people voted. And so we had participants vote either under situations of high electability concerns or situations where electability was not as much of a worry. And what we found was when electability is not a concern, everyone votes consistently across those two formats.
Kristen Duke:But what's interesting is what happens when people are worried about electability. And when they are, they're not willing to vote for their preferred candidates under a single choice voting, but they are for ranked choice voting. So it suggests that people are allowing electability to affect their decisions less when they're ranking. One of the things that our findings highlight is how this regular single choice first past the post system that a lot of countries and regions are using might be drawing too much attention to electability. So essentially because of the way those single choice systems work, people are worried about whether or not other people would be willing to vote for the people that they most prefer.
Kristen Duke:And so because of that, even if those perceptions are inaccurate, which other work suggests that particularly with voting for women, those beliefs can be inaccurate. When that happens, then people worry about and are not willing to vote for someone because they don't want their vote to be wasted. And a simple change in the voting system to something like ranked choice voting, which allows people to express their preferences more thoroughly and be less worried about electability, could be a way around this issue of nonrepresentation.
Carmina Ravanera:And for anyone who's thinking about running for office, don't be discouraged. There is hope. Erin told me that based on what she's learned from her interviews with women in politics, it's definitely not all doom and gloom.
Erin Tolley:All of this sounds rather depressing. You know, why would somebody run after after hearing all of this? I will say that a big part of my research involves interviews with candidates and elected, representatives, many many of them women and and racialized Canadians. And something that constantly amazes me, in these conversations is how these candidates talk about the difference they were able to make despite all of these challenges. They talk about the opportunity they've had to give voice to issues that were previously misunderstood or ignored.
Erin Tolley:They talk about the importance of being a role model and showing others like them that it's possible. And it's it's not right that the road is bumpier, you know, that needs to change. But my conversations with those who've walked that road suggest that it can be worth it. When I asked them, you know, what they would say to those who are thinking about running for office, most of them say, yeah. Sure.
Erin Tolley:Go into it with open eyes. You know? Know what is is going to confront you, but also just do it. Most of them say you gotta do it, and I really, you know, take a lot of comfort in that in that advice.
Sonia Kang:That's helpful to hear. So let's bust this myth once and for all. If I heard someone say that women or members of other marginalized groups are underrepresented in politics because they don't make good political leaders, what can I say to bust this myth?
Carmina Ravanera:Let's hear what our experts had to say.
Erin Tolley:I would first ask if white men have been good political leaders. You know, politics remains dominated by by white men. That's predominantly who holds positions of power. But look at the examples around us. Look at at the outcomes.
Erin Tolley:There's declining levels of confidence in parliament. Trust in politicians is at an all time low. We've never seen lower levels of voter turnout. I'm not really sure that we have a good counterexample. And partly, I think this is because being a political leader is hard.
Erin Tolley:Almost no politician is perfect and few are going to escape criticism. So, that's just kind of a fact of of political life. We can poke holes in most of our our leaders. The other thing I think that's important to think about is how we understand political leadership. So what assumptions or what stereotypes are we bringing to our assessment of political leaders, and how do our our ideas about masculinity and femininity, about gender appropriate behavior, how do those things, shape our assessment of of political, leaders?
Erin Tolley:The other thing is, you know, goes back to what I said previously that, you know, if we think about elected institutions and if we recognize that they're created by and for white men, we also need to recognize that people that don't fit that mold are coming into politics, facing a much steeper challenge. They're entering into an arena that doesn't understand them at at the very basis, as a very foundational principle as as being sort of included or being, kind of competent in this arena. And so you really have to kind of consider that that arena, when you're thinking about, good leadership. And and so not only do our understandings of race and gender shape how we assess, political leaders, but the structures also make it easier for some to succeed than others.
Mirya Holman:Well, you know, the reality is that all of the evidence from political science would suggest that women are actually better political leaders than men are. That, and part of that are these biases that exist in these systems and this gender social, these gendered socialization patterns. So, generally, women wait until they are more qualified and have more resources and have more connections and have done 2 or 3 times the amount of training before they run for political office. And then gender biases on the part of voters and donors and party leaders mean that only the best women are actually elected to political office, where that's not necessarily true for men. There's a lot of not the best men elected to political office.
Mirya Holman:And so when women go into political bodies, they work harder, they introduce more legislation, they're more effective at passing legislation, they're more collaborative, they produce better public policy. All of the things that we want from political leaders, women are all of those things.
Sonia Kang:With that, please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode of Busted. We'll be busting myths around sexual identity in the workplace.
Carmina Ravanera:Until next time. Happy myth busting. GATE's busted podcast is made possible by generous support from BMO. If you liked this episode, please rate and subscribe to Busted. You can also find more interesting podcast series from the Institute For Gender and the Economy by searching GATE Audio wherever you find your podcasts.
Carmina Ravanera:Thanks for tuning in.
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