Women have fought for the right to vote since the 19th century. Beginning with the 1848 Seneca Falls convention in New York – the first women's rights convention – women began to work towards enfranchising themselves. However, they had to face plenty of opposition from male politicians and struggled to gain traction before the 20th century. In order to combat this, women began to create a mass movement. Both the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Women's Party (NWP) worked together to lobby for women, undertake campaigns to empower women and protested for the women's suffrage. Finally, after years of struggle, the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, giving women the constitutional right to vote.
Nearly 100 years later, women are still facing a significant challenge in politics: representation.
Today, women roughly make up the majority of people in the United States, but according to NPR, women make up around 19 percent of the of all members of Congress, less than 25 percent of all state legislators and only 6 governors (12 percent) are women. On the presidential scale, women are only just starting to become regulars. This year, Hillary Clinton became the first woman presidential nominee of a major political party: the Democratic Party. However, the fact remains that there has never been a female President in the White House (although that may change after Election Day on Tuesday).
These staggering statistics raise an important question: Why are there so few women in politics? A 2012 report from American University researched this question and came up with the seven main barriers contributing to this political gender gap.
- Women are substantially more likely than men to perceive the electoral environment as highly competitive and biased against female candidates.
- Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s candidacies aggravated women’s perceptions of gender bias in the electoral arena.
- Women are much less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office.
- Female potential candidates are less competitive, less confident, and more risk averse than their male counterparts.
- Women react more negatively than men to many aspects of modern campaigns.
- Women are less likely than men to receive the suggestion to run for office – from anyone.
- Women are still responsible for the majority of childcare and household tasks.
Getting women on the ballot is definitely a big issue but so is encouraging women to run for office. According to social psychologist Brenda Major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, women have less confidence in their abilities, judge themselves harder and carry failures as heavier burdens than men.
"So many competent, capable women are basically selecting themselves out of leadership positions and I think that we've all wrestled with this," Major says. "I know it personally. I know it firsthand."
Findings also show that having women in office encourages other women to run for office as well; representation matters.
In the United States, women still face major issues of equality, representation and prejudice. Right now, America ranks 98th in the world percentage of women its national legislature, a rather embarrassing statistic. In comparison, in last week's election in Iceland, women won 30 out of 63 seats in Parliament, making them the "most equal Parliament in the world" without the use of a quota system, according to the country's Ministry for Foreign Affairs. What does that say about our country as a whole?
