Political Science professor explains when The first woman elected vice president of the United States. A record number of women in Congress. The highest percentage of women in the Wisconsin Legislature. Women are increasingly visible in American politics, a slow but steady climb that kicked off some 30 years ago and has increased incrementally every year since. Women represent 26% of congressional officeholders, while women make up 31% of Wisconsin’s Legislature, which is the average representation in state legislatures across the country. Nobody understands the factors behind these developments better than Kathleen Dolan, distinguished professor of political science. She’s spent much of her career researching issues at the intersection of gender and politics. “Since the beginning,” Dolan says, “I have been intrigued by questions of whether and how and when gender matters to politics.” Dolan’s research has followed two distinct lines of inquiry. The first focuses on female candidates, including the rates at which they run for office, the rates at which they win elections and whether gender matters in determining their success. The second aspect of Dolan’s research focuses on how gender matters when it comes to public opinion surrounding political issues. People had long assumed that the reason there were so few women in office is because voters wouldn’t vote for women. But Dolan’s research disproved that notion. Backed by funding from the National Science Foundation, she conducted
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Kathleen Dolan
a groundbreaking survey in 2010 of 3,000 people across the United States. She asked them about specific candidates in gubernatorial races as well as races for the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. As part of the study, Dolan focused on two categories of elections – one in which women ran against men and one in which two men were running. This allowed her to directly compare races that included women with races that only included men. The results showed that people were just as likely to vote for female candidates as they were for male candidates. In the end, the research found that people voted for the candidate of their preferred party, regardless of whether they were a woman or a man. Dolan found no evidence that voters crossed party lines to vote for a male candidate. “The main reason why there are so few women in office in the U.S. is because there are so few women who run,” Dolan says. “When they run, their rates of winning are at least as high as men, and often higher.”
Moreover, it doesn’t matter whether a female candidate runs as a Democrat or a Republican. Yes, there are many more Democratic women in public office than Republican women, but that’s only because there are many more women on Democratic tickets. “If the goal is to increase the overall number of women in elected office, you have to have more women running in both parties,” Dolan says. “What has to change is that the number of women candidates needs to be more equally represented in both parties.” There are some signs this may be happening. In the last 20 years, Dolan notes, about 70% of the women who ran for office ran as Democrats. In the 2020 election, a historic number of women ran for office, from Congress down to state-level seats. The increase in Republican female candidates outpaced the increase for Democratic ones, partly because the numbers among Republicans were smaller to begin with.
