By Frances Rosenbluth

Frances Rosenbluth, a professor of Political Science at Yale, is a comparative political economist with a special interest in Japan. Her current work focuses on the electoral microfoundations of different forms of capitalism, and on the politics of gender inequality.

Females are strikingly underrepresented in the world’s legislatures, though the variation among rich democracies
is enormous, ranging from 9% in Japan and 14% in the U.S. at the low end, to near parity in Sweden at the high end. If politicians’ accountability to voters were perfect, female political representation would not matter, since politicians would aim to construct and implement policies that the electorate favors. Political accountability aside, the fact that female representation is substantially below parity is enough to raise suspicions that competition is not on an even playing field.

This article addresses three related questions: Why are women underrepresented in most countries? What accounts for the vast difference in female representation across countries? Finally, what difference does female political representation make to policies that women care about?

Why Are Women Underrepresented Almost Everywhere?

In democracies around the world, women turn out in elections in numbers comparable to or only slightly lower than those of men. There is some evidence that female interest in politics is dampened by the scarcity of women in positions of political leadership with whom they can relate.1 So this suggests a vicious cycle, but it doesn’t explain why females are not elected to office in the first place. Is it a demand-side problem, in which there is lower voter demand for female candidates, or a supply-side one in which females are not running for office?

The answer is not as simple as one might think. There is evidence from the U.S. and U.K., for example, that women who run for office in contested elections—that is, where there is not a powerful incumbent protecting his home turf—get roughly the same proportion of votes as male candidates.2 So gender discrimination does not seem to capture the whole story. Kenworthy and Malami have argued that there is a supply-side bottleneck in the sense that relevant political experience is managerial and professional work, and everywhere in the world there are fewer women than men in these sorts of jobs.3 While Kenworthy and Malami’s data provide compelling evidence of a supply side effect, the broad-strokes picture leaves some jarring anomalies, including the U.S. case. There are more professional women—by which they mean lawyers, educators, journalists, and business professionals—in the U.S. than in any other country in the world. And yet, female political representation in the U.S. is notoriously low. To get at this simple question of generalized female underrepresentation, it will be helpful to see what accounts for the variation across countries.

What Accounts for Cross-National Variation?

The scholarly consensus is that electoral rules matter for female representation, and that specifically, proportional representation (PR) systems are friendlier to successful female candidacy than district systems. (Proportional representation refers to electoral rules—typical in European countries—in which voters choose among party lists, and parties get legislative seats in proportion to their votes. In single-member-district
systems such as the U.S. and the U.K., the candidate with the most votes wins the seat.) In Japan, for example, 6.3% of the parliamentarians elected from single member districts are females, compared to 13.3% elected from party lists on proportional representation ballots. Though 13.3% is still low by world standards, it is double the district line up returned by the same voters in the same election. Clearly, cultural preferences
leave substantial variation unexplained.

Exactly how proportional representation rules help the cause of female candidates is only dimly understood, but the reason seems to be something like this. The demand for female representation is powerfully shaped by how effective political party leaders and voters expect female candidates will act. Even in the absence of discriminatory social norms, electoral systems that place a premium on seniority, career continuity, and individual clout hurt the electoral chances of female candidates in a way that centralized party systems do not. Why females do more poorly in district systems than in PR systems is related to a phenomenon economists Jacob Mincer and Solomon Polachek noticed in labor markets: when labor productivity rests on skills that are acquired through long-term skill acquisition, workers who interrupt their careers (such as for child rearing or other family work) are less valuable to their employers.4 The implication of their work is that the actuarial difference in leave rates taken by females compared to males can generate “statistical discrimination” where otherwise negative stereotypes did not exist.

Where party leadership is centralized and elections are contested on a common party platform, as in PR systems, the reputation of the party and the strength of its platform take on greater importance than the popularity or pledges of the individual candidate. Seniority, and other ways to access money, are less valuable assets in strong party systems than in systems where politicians must ensure a personal following that extends beyond partisan loyalties. This may go a long way in explaining why female political representation in the U.S. is lower than theories based on voter demand or candidate supply would suggest. All else equal, female representation is higher in countries where electoral competition is between parties rather than between individuals.

What Difference Does Female Political Representation Make for Policy Outcomes?

A first cut statistical analysis of the relationship between female political representation and things many women care about, such as equal access to work opportunities, in fact shows no connection. With the exception of Scandinavia, to which we will return, women score higher on female labor force participation rates, proportion of women in professional careers, and gender wage parity in the very district-based political systems in which female political representation is stunted. What accounts for this paradox?

The answer runs through the same labor market logic that helped to explain why seniority hurts female candidates in single member district systems. In European PR systems, labor is relatively well protected because labor parties are recurring players in coalition governments. (In single-member district systems, labor is never a majority by itself so its interests are compromised with other voters’ interests in search of an electoral majority.) Employers in PR systems therefore invest in employees’ skills acquisition to make the best of politically-mandated long tenure. As long as women are relatively more likely than men to interrupt their careers to raise children or take care of the elderly, females are a poor employment investment. The paradox of European welfare states, at least for women, is that jobs are more secure but women are not wanted for those jobs. As a result, female labor force participation rates, female wages, and female advancement tend to be lower in welfare states than in Anglo-American laissez-faire economies where men and women are of equal investment value because no one is expected to stay working for long.5 The exception is Scandinavian states, where women do poorly in the private sector but are hired in large numbers by the public sector where their extra cost—including the famously generous parental leave—is covered by taxpayers.

Conclusions

Women voters, particularly working women, have distinct interests from men because, as default caregivers, women have to worry about balancing the demands of family and career in ways that rarely concern men. The “gender voting gap,” or the degree to which females vote to the left of males, has grown in tandem with female labor force participation, doubtless because females value the services and socialization of family work provided by parties on the left.6 In single-member district systems such as the U.S., the gender voting gap exists but has not translated into high levels of female political representation because women achieve many of their goals directly in the labor market. Women in PR systems have greater difficulty accessing the labor market but are more successful, thanks to centralized parties, in getting females elected. It remains to be seen if female representatives in PR systems can effectively tackle the labor market obstacles that confront women there. And while working women in single member district systems may enjoy relatively equal labor market access, intra-gender wage inequality is a large cost borne by women at the bottom of the income distribution.

The bottom line for the presidential election of 2008: Hillary can win. She has built an enormous store of political capital, and American voters are not as anti-female as the numbers suggest. But don’t count on many women to replicate her success. Politics will not become as much a woman’s job as a man’s until changing diapers becomes as much a man’s job as a woman’s.

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