Do Women Have an Inner Glass Ceiling?

By J. Goodrich, AlterNet. Posted July 30, 2008.

Imagine this: You are running for Congress, campaigning and trying to carry out all your usual obligations. Then one morning your home burns down. While you and your family escape unharmed, almost every single thing you owned has disappeared. How long would you take before you'd start campaigning again? Six months? A year? Never?

These events are not imaginary, but something which happened to Darcy Burner and her family on the first of July. She took a campaign break of eighteen days. Eighteen days. Now that is some determination! We might even call this political ambition, a great desire to serve the public no matter what.

Burner is not the only woman who has demonstrated such stamina and focus in political life. Madeline Albright, the first female Secretary of State of the United States, once said that she wanted to do more than to just maintain the achievements of earlier Secretaries of State: she wanted to aim higher. Carol Moseley Brown had enough political ambition not only to become the first female African-American Senator in the United States Congress, but to run for the president of the United States. And we are all familiar with Hilary Clinton's recent presidential run and political ambition.

Yet Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post columnist, thinks that it is the lack of political ambition which keeps women away from participating in political life. It's not discrimination that keeps the number of American women in Congress at 16 percent; the problem, she writes, is that women have an "inner glass ceiling": a tendency to give up too soon and too easily, a tendency to shirk away from the feistiness of political battles, a tendency to underrate their own abilities.

Marcus learned this from a recent Brookings Institute study by Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox, which is summarized like this: "In this report, we argue that the fundamental reason for women's under-representation is that they don't run for office. There is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it and women don't."

It's certainly a convenient conclusion -- If the reason for so few women in political decision-making roles is their own unwillingness to play the game, we as a society don't have to do anything to change the situation. It's up to women themselves to become more ambitious, and if they don't, well, perhaps it's all to do with biological differences between men and women. Right?

Caryl Rivers, a media critic, author and expert on the popularizations of gender science points out the great appeal of such explanations, especially now that the decoding of the human genome is in the news almost daily: "If you take the extreme view of gender differences as all biological, then if girls trail boys in math scores, say, no action is necessary. This despite the fact that Korean girls score higher than American boys."

Never mind if scientific studies show that things like the genetics of "political ambition" remain science-fiction; to appeal to biology allows us all not to worry about the effects of culture or gender roles in the division of labor. If glass ceilings are internal, then the problems belong to the individual women and individual women alone. Perhaps they are not problems at all, but Just The Way Things Are?

I almost hesitate to break the peace and comfort of that explanation, but break it I must, if not for any other reason than the one that the Lawless and Fox study isn't about "political ambition" in the colloquial sense of the term (how would one even go about measuring that?) but about studying the process, which leads a qualified individual to either decide to run for political office or not.

For this purpose, the study selected several thousand men and women from the fields that are usually seen as good launching pads for political careers -- law, business, education and political activism -- and then asked them questions about their political plans, attitudes and life situations, both in 2001 and in 2008.

The answers to these questions showed that equally qualified men and women may have different family responsibilities, different levels of external encouragement and support, different views about the political environment, different assessments about their own competence and different feelings about the negative aspects of campaigning. Some of these may be related to the way we usually understand the term "political ambition," but others have more to do with the institutional constraints of American politics or with socially accepted gender roles.

To give just one example of the latter, 60 percent of women with children in the study told the researchers that they were the primary caregivers for their children, while 60 percent of the men with children in the study described their partner as the primary caregiver. Given that all the study subjects already had careers, entering politics would mean a third job for these women but only a second job for the men.

See more stories tagged with: sexism, women in politics, hillary clinton, political ambition, gender in politics

J. Goodrich is an economist. Her writing has been published in the American Prospect and Ms. magazine and on various political Web sites. She also blogs at Echidne of the Snakes.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »