segunda-feira, 29 de junho de 2015

The gender gap in political ambition starts at an amazingly young age


In high school, boys and girls are equally likely to say that a parent has encouraged them to run for office. Among college-age men, the percent who says they have been encouraged by a parent increases, but the percent among women decreases. Meanwhile, college students are more likely than high school students to say that they talk about politics with friends weekly, but the difference is larger for men than women.

John Sides
If you want to increase the number of women in elective office in the United States, perhaps the biggest problem is the well-documented gender gap in political ambition. When women run, they tend to do about as well as men.  But they aren’t as likely as men to want to run in the first place.
Now, new research (gatedungated) by Richard Fox and Jennifer Lawless, two scholars of gender and political ambition, shows that the gap in political ambition emerges very early, even by age 18.
Based on a large survey of high school and college students, Fox and Lawless found that young men were more likely than young women to say they would consider running for office. But this gap was not evident among the high school students, just the college students. Consider this graph:

(…)







John Sides - Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. He specializes in public opinion, voting, and American elections – 19.01.2015
IN Washington Post.