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 (gated; ungated) 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:
(…)
Para continuar a leitura, acesse http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/19/the-gender-gap-in-political-ambition-starts-at-an-amazingly-young-age/
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.