Image of Gender and Political Leadership: A Multinational View of Women and Leadership

"This is the first multi-country, factorial experiment on candidate gender designed to avoid social desirability bias and provide a real-world measure of the importance of gender via direct quantitative contrasts with party effect size (the experimental control, which was statistically significant in all cases). The 8 countries: Canada in Alberta and Quebec, Chile, Costa Rica, England, Israel, Sweden, Uruguay, and the U.S. in California and Texas, are established presidential and parliamentary democracies that jointly offer variance on incorporation of women in government, policy agenda, electoral rules, and party system. Young adult participants come from highly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in all cases. Political science and psychology literaturesare the basis of a multi-dimensional framework about how context molds mental templates of leadership, yielding 11 hypotheses. The 2x2x2 experimental factors, treatments (a lengthy candidate speech with partisan jargon and buzz words), field implementation, and ANOVA techniques used for analysis are outlined in detail. Resident in-country experts who implemented the experiment interpret findings against key country-specific historic and current events in separate country chapters, followed by a chapter providing a meta-analysis of all hypotheses across cases. Though many broad and case specific conclusions can be drawn, the main finding is that traditional leadership images (leaders are men) appear only where defense dominates the political agenda. Otherwise, in diverse contexts, women candidates are accepted as leaders by the participants, indicating young adults' approval of women's ability to hold diverse posts, win votes, and manage stereotypically masculine policy areas"--
There are many theories as to why women remain severely underrepresented in democratic governments. Perhaps voters do not consider women to be capable leaders, or maybe party elites obstruct women's paths to office because they don't believe that they are electable. But if these attitudes are hurdles standing in the way of women being elected to office, where did they develop?In The Image of Gender and Political Leadership, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson and Nehemia Geva bring together parallel experiments conducted in countries around the world to compare the ways in which young adults view gender and leadership. Together, the chapters in this book present findings from on-site experiments conducted with over 6,000 young adult students of highly diverse socio-economic backgrounds in eight countries that have varying levels of experience with women in government: Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, England, Israel, Sweden, the United States, and Uruguay. Overall, the book finds little evidence of traditional gender stereotypes that would limit young people's support for women as political leaders. Women candidates are accepted as leaders by the participants, indicating young adults' approval of women's ability to hold diverse posts, win votes, and manage stereotypically masculine policy areas. The book also finds that young adults are very responsive to politicalparty--regardless of gender, they tend to favor candidates from their preferred parties. With an in-depth, cross-national perspective, Taylor-Robinson and Geva provide empirical evidence to dispel myths about what contributes to the low election rates of women, and importantly, investigate logical steps to achieve gender parity.