Fifteen Eighty Four

Women in politics are everywhere. Vice President Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the Democratic nominee when Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in Summer 2024. Republican Nikki Haley was the last candidate standing to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination that same year. Nancy Pelosi served as Speaker of the House – twice – between 2007 and 2024. Conservative firebrands Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are social media stars. AOC is a household acronym. And more than three and a half years out from the 2028 election, Ballotpedia has already identified nine women as prospective presidential candidates.

Despite these famous faces, women today are just as unlikely as women 20 years ago to express interest in running for office. That’s right. We’ve been studying women and men’s interest in running for office for more than two decades and, as we make clear in our new book, It Takes More Than a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office, very little has changed.

We started tracking people’s interest in running for office in 2001, when we launched the first wave of the Citizen Political Ambition Study – a survey of 4,000 “potential candidates.” These are people with professional backgrounds common among elected officials – lawyers, businesspeople, educators, and political activists. Among this sample of equally matched women and men, 59% of men had considered running for some elective position, compared to just 43% of women. Women were also much less likely than men to express interest in running for office in the future. This was true regardless of political party affiliation, income, age, race, region of the country, even martial and parental status.

Ten years later, we conducted another wave of the study. Once again, we surveyed a national sample of 4,000 potential candidates. By then, Hillary Clinton had run for president; Sarah Palin had been a vice presidential candidate; and the percentage of women in Congress had increased by 25%. Yet the results of 2011 Citizen Political Ambition Study were indistinguishable from the 2001 findings. The gender gap in interest in running for office was just as large – 16 percentage points – and just as sweeping as it had been a decade earlier.           

We did it all again in 2021, with one change in our approach. Because there is now more diversity in careers preceding a political candidacy than there was two decades ago, we supplemented the sample of lawyers, businesspeople, educators, and political activists with more than 2,600 people who are college-educated and work full-time, but do not hold the same positions as those in the four original pipeline professions. An important advantage of broadening the sample is that it also allows for more racial diversity. Regardless of whether we focus on the broader sample or on just the pipeline professions, the gender gap in political ambition held steady (see Figure 1). Whereas nearly 60% of men had considered running for office, nearly 60% of women had not.

The gender differences go far beyond the general thought of running for office. Men are twice as likely as women to report that they’ve “seriously considered” a candidacy. And they are twice as likely as women to say that they’d be open to running for office in the future. (This is true whether we’re talking about local offices like mayor or federal positions like the U.S. Congress.)

Figure 1. The Gender Gap in Considering a Candidacy

Notes: Bars represent the percentages of potential candidates who reported that they ever considered running for office, as well as the gender gap (in percentage points) at each point in time. Panel (A) includes women and men who work in law, business, education, and politics. Panel (B) supplements that sample in 2021 with 2,667 respondents who are college-educated and employed full-time, but do not hold the same positions as those in the Four Professions Sample. The gender gap is significant at p < .05 in all comparisons.

The roots of the ambition gap are deeply-embedded. Consider how women and men with the same qualifications and credentials evaluate themselves. Whereas 30% of men we surveyed consider themselves “very qualified” to run for office, only 16% of women feel that way. By contrast, women are more than twice as likely as men (30% compared to 14%) to rate themselves as “not at all qualified” to run. These gender differences have not narrowed since 2001 or 2011.  

Potential candidates’ self-perceptions are consistent with messages they receive – or don’t – about running for office. Men are 57% more likely than women to have been encouraged to run by an elected official, party leader, or political activist. They are one-third more likely to receive the suggestion to run from a colleague, spouse, or family member. On this dimension, too, the gender differences are just as large as they were 20 years ago.

A lot has changed since we conducted the first wave of our study in 2001. The number of women serving in Congress has doubled (to 28%). Women’s organizations have made it a priority to recruit women to run for office. And famous female politicians, glass-shattering candidacies, more attention to women’s under-representation, women’s marches, and #MeToo are features of the contemporary political environment.

These changes and efforts have helped propel a record number of women into elective office, but they haven’t been sufficient to close the gender gap in political ambition. Still today, we operate in a world where people see men as candidates and many men see themselves that way. Most women don’t.

There’s no question that it takes a candidate to achieve gender parity in U.S. political institutions. But when it comes to breaking down longstanding beliefs about politics and the very nature of the political domain, our new book makes clear that it takes more than a candidate. Until women are just as likely as men to consider running for office – even if they ultimately write it off as something they don’t want to do – then we really haven’t achieved women’s full inclusion in the political system. And politics will remain a game for men.

Jennifer L. Lawless is the Leone Reeves and George W. Spicer Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. Richard L. Fox is Dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University.