Politics & Gender, 12 (2016), e1, 1–11.

Book Review
Thematic Review: Women in Public Office: Overcoming
Obstacles, Still Facing Challenges

He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm

Women Candidates. By Deborah Jordan Brooks. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2013. 221 pp. $26.95 paper.
More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State
Legislatures. By Susan J. Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013. 160 pp. $28.95 paper.
Shattered, Cracked or Firmly Intact? Women and the
Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide. By Farida Jalalzai. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013. 305 pp. $73.00 hardcover.
Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision
to Run for Office. By Jennifer L Lawless. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012. 279 pp. $29.99 paper.
Contagious Representation: Women’s Political Representation
in Democracies around the World. By Frank C. Thames and
Margaret S. Williams. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 208
pp. $45.00 hardcover.
doi:10.1017/S1743923X15000677

Karen L. Shelby
University of San Diego
Noelle H. Norton
University of San Diego
Scholars of women and politics have been trying to determine what
difference gender makes in the political system since the number of
Published by Cambridge University Press 1743-923X/16 $30.00 for The Women and Politics Research Section of the
American Political Science Association.
# The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association, 2016.

1
2 POLITICS & GENDER, 12 (1), 2016

women leaders has grown substantially over the past several decades. A set
of five recent books illuminates a variety of questions that help us consider
the relation of gender to electoral politics — from the development of
political ambition to holding elective office at the highest levels.
Research in gender and politics shows that while the gap between men
and women has been narrowing over time, there are still substantive
differences in women’s and men’s levels and opportunities for political
engagement, whether locally, nationally, or globally. Taken together,
these five books offer insights into the challenges women leaders have
overcome and the obstacles they continue to face. Women are getting
elected and are viewed as effective leaders. However, perceptions of who
is qualified to be a candidate, as well as gatekeeping within parties have
kept women from being elected at rates comparable to men worldwide.
The beauty of reading these five books is that they present a
comprehensive behavioral, institutional, and cultural analysis of the
progress women have made in elected office. Not only do these books
use robust quantitative and qualitative methods to support conclusions,
but they also provide comparative analysis if read together.
The first three books reviewed here use data from the United States to
return to questions about the success of women candidates over time. In
Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for
Office, Jennifer Lawless argues that we still need to focus on nascent
ambition, perception of qualifications, and recruitment in order to
encourage more women to run for office. Susan Carroll and Kira
Sanbonmatsu show in More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to
the State Legislatures, that women are indeed getting elected, although
not necessarily from the professional backgrounds that have typically led
to political office for men. In He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender
Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates, Deborah Jordan Brooks
argues that people are ready to treat women as “leaders, not ladies,”
particularly once they are in office. As a whole, these books help us
understand what hinders women in the American political context, yet
they offer a hopeful picture for women’s electoral prospects: evidence
presented by Frank C. Thames and Margaret S. Williams in Contagious
Representation: Women’s Political Representation in Democracies around
the World suggests a contagion among systems will lead to the election of
more women worldwide; and evidence presented by Farida Jalalzai in
Shattered, Cracked or Firmly Intact? Women and the Executive Glass
Ceiling Worldwide, pinpoints the final political position that needs
“cracking.”
BOOK REVIEW 3

In Becoming a Candidate, Lawless argues that “political ambition is a far

more volatile commodity than prior research acknowledges, and that the
initial decision to run for office is driven systematically by far more than
a political opportunity structure” (23). Lawless examines four factors that
shape the development of political ambition in candidates: minority
status; family dynamics, both in terms of early political socialization and
the balancing act of having a family and career; professional experiences
and perception of qualifications; and, finally, political attitudes and
recruitment (20 – 22). Lawless constructs an additive empirical model
that predicts candidate emergence, drawing on the Citizen Political
Ambition Panel Study that she and Richard Fox compiled in 2001 and
2008, initially mailing surveys to 6,800 citizens who occupy “the four
professions and backgrounds that tend to yield the highest proportion of
political candidates: law, business, education and political activism” (25).
Lawless uses the data to examine the issue of nascent ambition, shifting
the question of who decides to run for office and why to a time horizon
long before a decision has been made.
Lawless examines differences in ambition by gender and race. Her analysis
reveals that “[w]omen and men in the candidate eligibility pool may be
similarly situated . . . [b]ut women of all races exhibit significantly lower
levels of interest in entering electoral politics than do their male
counterparts” (75). In part, this may be attributable to the perception that
it is harder for women to win races (72), whether or not that is the case.
Race alone, however, is not attributable to differences in ambition, as
black potential candidates are more likely than white and Latino
respondents to have considered running for office. In order to account for
these differences, Lawless examines the role of the family in candidate
emergence, finding that “indicators of a politicized upbringing . . . exert
three times the effect of sex on considering a candidacy; growing up in a
politicized home, therefore, can more than compensate for the
disadvantage women face in developing nascent ambition” (84). Beyond
socialization, a family situation can inspire a run for office for some
individuals, while for others the balancing act of work and family makes it
a difficult proposition. Family responsibilities can influence both men and
women not to make a run for office. However, qualitative evidence from
interviews with 150 women and 150 men showed that while 82 of the
women “stated that children made seeking office a more difficult endeavor
for women,” only seven of the men did so (94). Support, or lack thereof,
from within a family can alleviate or reinforce concerns about running for
office (99).
4 POLITICS & GENDER, 12 (1), 2016

Chapters 6 through 8 take up the question of candidate qualifications

and the decision to run for office. Lawless finds that women are more
likely to underestimate their qualifications, contributing to the gender
gap in candidacy. Black respondents have higher self-efficacy
assessments, yet “are significantly less likely to consider running for
office” (128). It is unclear whether black women are subject to
diminished assessment of their qualifications or not. There is, however, a
significant gap in the recruitment of women compared to men in both
2001 and 2008, particularly for Republican women (146 –48). The final
element that can affect recruitment is the overall perception of the
political process. As cynicism in the candidate pool increases, the desire
to run for office decreases.
While Lawless’ data drew on the four most common professions of
elected officials, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu show that women getting
elected to office are often coming to electoral politics from professions
that deviate from the traditional norm. In More Women Can Run, they
find that although women’s multiple pathways to elected office are often
different from men’s, women are nonetheless running for office and
getting elected. Women’s underrepresentation is still a problem.
However, they offer a hopeful analysis, concluding that women who
would like to run for office and win need not seek to replicate men’s
paths to politics. Ultimately, more women should run because more
women are electable.
Carroll and Sanbonmatsu use data from surveys of state legislators
conducted in 1981 and in 2008, as well as follow-up interviews, to assess
strategies for bringing more women into office. They reexamine factors
understood to account for women’s underrepresentation and find within
each of them an underlying assumption that there is one best path to
political office. Their data, however, show that women state legislators
are forging many different pathways to office. Women have not followed
their advances in the fields of law and business with greater political
representation, as expected. Instead, they have been elected from fields
such as education and health care that have been female-dominated.
The persistent differences in the area of women state legislators’
occupation, construed under the traditional model as a deviation from
the norm, may actually be a key strength from which to grow the notion
of who could be a candidate for office and what qualifications best befit
them. Women already seem to come to office with greater political
experience than their male counterparts, according to data from both
BOOK REVIEW 5

1981 and 2008. However, they experience a confidence gap, part of which
may be why women are not getting to office in the “right” way.
While family issues were important for both men and women
candidates, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu found that women were more
often affected by the gender division of labor in the home (28). While
these responsibilities may weigh against a run for office, traditional
models of self-activated ambition fail to account for the “relationally-
embedded decision” that more often applies to women than men who
do decide to run for office (42). Family groups, community networks,
organizations, and elected officials can help women see themselves as
candidates. Political parties are also a part of this community. However,
recent stagnation in the numbers of women candidates is largely the
result of diminished numbers of Republican women being elected. The
authors note that “[w]omen did not become less Republican . . .; rather,
men became more Republican” (70). Ideological shift in the Republican
Party has had a profound effect on women’s candidacies, and
conservative selection bias has exercised a disproportionate effect on
women (83).
By contrast, Democratic women are far outpacing Republican women,
despite their lack of parity with Democratic men. The election of
Democratic women of color has fueled these advances, but the tendency
to elect Democratic women of color from majority-minority districts
threatens the continuation of this upward trend (93 – 94). However, those
minority women are more likely than their white counterparts to have
faced a primary challenge, or to have had divided party support (104).
Despite this, party support is an important factor in running for office for
more Democratic women than men (113). When asked about their
perceptions of statewide candidates’ fundraising, “more than four times
as many Democratic women as men . . . agreed that ‘[i]t is harder for
female candidates to raise money than male candidates’” (115). More
research is needed to determine whether this gap discourages women
from running for office and to determine what fundraising differences
continue to exist.
Carroll and Sanbonmatsu remind us in their final chapter that women
do not need to be more like men in order to get elected to office. Women
more often than men need to be recruited, and they need to be given
resources to successfully compete. For Democratic women, those
resources have often come from women’s organizations (126). However,
parties (and other groups) may offer greater support once they realize
6 POLITICS & GENDER, 12 (1), 2016

that taking a different path is not a deviation, but rather a new norm that
women have established through their electoral successes.
Deborah Jordan Brooks also shows that women are now more successful
as candidates. She approaches the issue of women’s national electoral
opportunities by asking “whether gender stereotypes and double
standards do, in fact, hold back female candidates on the campaign trail”
(4). In He Runs, She Runs, Brooks argues that “the general public simply
no longer views women legislators as being less capable than men on
traits central to leadership and does not penalize women for acting in a
tough and ‘unfeminine’ manner” (4 –5). Brooks draws on data collected
in 2009 to contest the conventional wisdom that there are tougher
standards of qualification and double standards in behavior for women
candidates. Instead, she argues that, “female candidates will be judged
on the basis of good leadership rather than on the basis of good
femininity, and thus do not face higher standards” (12).
The second and third chapters of Brooks’ book describe the double
standards theory she’s contesting and her method of gathering data.
Brooks predicts “that most people in the current era will evaluate
legislative candidates on the basis of matters other than gender” (38). In
order to test this, she used a set of six Goldberg paradigm experiments,
administering online surveys to 3,000 U.S. adults. In paired narratives,
names and gender pronouns were altered, but a fictional story, which
incorporated certain behaviors, concerning the candidate was held
constant. Each survey respondent was given one article to read about
either “Karen Bailey” or “Kevin Bailey” and then was asked a series of
questions about the candidate. Brooks summarizes her research overall,
arguing that “[t]he bottom line of most of my findings is that the public
does not have different standards for female candidates than it does for
their male counterparts” (58). In chapters 4 through 8, Brooks finds each
time that the public judge her hypothetical man and woman similarly, if
not the same, on a variety of measures, such as experience, emotion,
lack of empathy, and lack of knowledge.
Ultimately, Brooks argues, “Too many different situations were tested in
this study with no indication of gender bias and double standards to think
that Americans as a whole are unsupportive of women leaders” (146).
Brooks hopes that her findings will persuade more women to run “by
correcting a prevalent misperception that women face disproportionate
challenges vis-à-vis public opinion” (147). For her, the conventional
wisdom that women’s electoral campaigns are harder to win because of
stereotypes held by the public is a falsehood, “a common misperception
BOOK REVIEW 7

that is disseminated by many political elites” (162). Brooks argues that the
public has learned to treat women candidates, in her terms, as “leaders not
ladies.”1 Once political elites do this as well, candidate emergence may
become the next terrain upon which women find parity.
Taken together, the books by Lawless, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu, and
Brooks show that American women are running for office and winning,
and their constituents see them as strong leaders. All three books provide
updates on how women are more likely to run and win. However, work
needs to be done in developing women’s nascent ambition and
challenging women’s diminished perceptions of their qualifications for
office. Likewise, parties’ leaders must be led to see women’s full
potential as candidates in order to balance women’s representation in the
American system.
Where the first three volumes reviewed here analyze the transformation
of women’s pathways to elected office over the past several decades in the
United States, the last two volumes focus their analysis on women as
elected political leaders on the contemporary global stage. They help us
consider two more important questions: (1) Does it matter if women are
running and winning more often? (2) Can we draw conclusions from
the American example? Contagious Representation: Women’s Political
Representation in Democracies around the World by Franck Thames and
Margaret Williams and Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact? Women and
the Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide by Farida Jalalzai extend the
analysis of women’s political engagement to an evaluation of their
successes obtaining and maintaining political power around the globe.
Despite current evidence that multiple pathways to power exist for
women candidates, women are more electable, and the public does not
view women as less capable of leadership, structural barriers continue to
limit women’s descriptive and substantive representation in political
institutions at the local, national, and global levels. The extensive data
presented in these next two volumes suggest that women, in particular,
continue to face significant hurdles in breaking the executive and
judicial glass ceiling around the world.
Both books use large-number (N) comparative databases, time series
analysis spanning multiple decades, cross-sectional data including Africa,
Latin America, and consider legislative, executive, judicial, and party

1. Complicating Brooks’ experimental results, however, are studies that examine treatment of women
candidates by the media. For example, Dunaway et al. (2013) find that when women run, media stories
focus more often on personal traits rather than substantive qualifications.
8 POLITICS & GENDER, 12 (1), 2016

institutions. They also nicely juxtapose quantitative and qualitative analysis

to make their arguments. Thames and Williams, for example, use country
case studies of France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States, while Jalalzai
employs both country case studies and case studies of women executives
and candidates for executive office like Margaret Thatcher (UK),
Ségolène Royal (France), and Hillary Clinton (U.S.). In addition to
country and institutional level analysis, neither book sets aside the
important correlation between expanding labor force participation and
cultural support for women as they evaluate their growing strength inside
political institutions.
In Contagious Representation, Thames and Williams argue that the
inclusion of women in one political institution leads to an extension of
their numbers and strength in other political institutions. They theorize
that the election of more women legislators will increase the chance of a
contagion effect that opens doors for women elected officials in other
branches of government and as political party leaders. The authors note
that much of the literature on women political leaders is limited to
studies of single institutions, single countries, or single regions, and they
“seek to understand whether women’s legislative representation in any
way explains increases in women’s representations in other areas” (3). In
chapters 2 and 3, their analysis of 159 countries spanning 61 years
(1945 –2006) shows that the increase of women legislators enhances the
chance that a country will select a female president or prime minister.
However, they also discover that the presence of a female executive does
not conversely effect an increase in women’s legislative representation.
Chapter 4 shows that “part of the variation in the level of women’s
representation in other democratic institutions explains the variation in
women’s high court representation” (61). As an example, Thames and
Williams demonstrate that Japan lags behind the rest of the world in
women’s judiciary participation in part because they are well below
average in women’s legislative representation (73). These findings suggest
a limited contagion effect depending on region because evidence of the
relationship is most apparent in the 34 countries that are members of the
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Finally, in
chapters 5 and 6 the authors demonstrate with data and further case
studies of Sweden and Ireland that voluntary party quotas are contagious
across all parties within a system and are directly related to the adoption
of national party quotas. However, there is no evidence that an increase
in legislative or executive seats for women increases the adoption of
national party quotas.
BOOK REVIEW 9

Thames and Williams’ accessible, rigorous, and complex analysis

reminds us that factors other than ambition, cultural support, and
increased participation of women in the labor force should be
considered when attempting to explain the growth and complexity of
women’s political leadership worldwide. Still, the institutional contagion
argument has limited explanatory power, despite the appeal and promise
of the thesis. The authors find evidence of contagion in established
democracies but still find significant variation across region and in
transitioning democracies. As the numbers of women leaders grow at all
levels of government and across regions, this kind of comprehensive and
ambitious global institutional analysis will be of more value, and the
results will be more generalizable. Until then, there is still value in the
single institutional explorations of women’s leadership.
By narrowing the analysis to the executive branch but still maintaining a
global approach, Jalalzai is able to make a more convincing case about the
current status of women candidates and political leaders. She argues that
women candidates and political leaders may have had success around
the globe as candidates and legislators but that “men continue to
dominate as presidents and prime ministers, and this will undoubtedly
persist for the foreseeable future” (9). Even when women are elected to
serve as executives, Jalalzai argues that “they often occupy weaker posts
than men in systems with less concentrated authority” (54). In another
large-N comparative analysis, Jalalzai goes beyond the typical single case
study or regional analysis to explore a dataset of 80 women elected
executives and 252 women candidates for executive office between 1960
and 2010. Similar to Thames and Williams, in her exploration of
executive office, Jalalzai looks at a variety of factors. She specifically
considers region, time, political system, gender, a country’s international
position, relevant country context, and the personal success and
professional characteristics of the women elected or seeking executive
office. Like Thames and Williams, the analysis uses both comprehensive
quantitative data and rich qualitative data including candidate case studies.
Unlike the other books reviewed here, Jalalzai questions the assumption
that women have made vast progress over the past several decades — at least
in the executive branch. She notes the great strides women have made
toward executive leadership but also points out that there have been only
79 women executives around the world in more than five decades: “the
glass ceiling indeed appears shattered in some contexts, such as Finland,
only cracked in the United Kingdom, and firmly intact in the United
States” (40). In chapters 2 and 3, the book includes a thorough literature
10 POLITICS & GENDER, 12 (1), 2016

review of women in executive office and a review of various selection

procedures for executives in different political systems. One of the more
interesting features of the book is Jalalzai’s typology of executive positions
based on constitutional design and governance power in practice. The
results of her analyses demonstrate that “women rarely rule the more
visible and globally critical countries,” despite the unique example of
Germany’s Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in the United
States (55). Women are more likely to serve as a dual-executive, a prime
minister, and to be selected by the legislature than to serve in a unified
presidential system and/or to be elected by popular vote.
Chapters 4 through 6 provide a nice complement to the Lawless, Carroll
and Sanbonmatsu, and Brooks titles about women and elections. Where
the books reviewed previously indicate the challenges women candidates
both face and have overcome in the U.S. system, Jalalzai shows that a
cross-regional analysis uncovers remaining challenges to women’s
pathway to power. Here she reviews the variation that exists in women’s
executive candidacies and executive power by presenting data and several
candidate case studies. The review of women’s leadership style,
ambition, political experience, family ties to office, and unique electoral
circumstances discussed in these three chapters outlines the
idiosyncrasies that explain many successes of female executives. They
also emphasize the substantive differences in male and female leadership
styles and pathways to office. Women are more likely to have held more
feminine leadership posts as opposed to more masculine posts in military
or security; they are more likely to have family ties to executive office;
and the most powerful women have come to office via unique
circumstances. In its final chapters, the book presents comparative case
studies of Hillary Clinton (U.S.) and Ségolène Royal (France). These
two case studies highlight why women in some of the most influential
countries in of the world are not successful despite the strength of their
candidacies. In summary, Jalalzai argues that women are more likely to
hold office in places where executives have dispersed institutional power,
if they hold power at all.
Read together, these five books show that women are indeed more
electable and that their numbers have increased significantly over the last
several decades. Women can be found more frequently running for
office and serving as legislators, party leaders, and judges. Further,
evidence presented in these volumes suggests that women approach their
candidacies and leadership posts differently than do men, but they are
still more frequently perceived as electable and capable today than in the
BOOK REVIEW 11

past. This rosy picture is tempered by the two large-scale comparative

analyses of women candidates and officeholders. Both the Thames and
Williams and the Jalalzai books indicate that women are now more
likely to advance worldwide in nonexecutive posts, but only in
established democracies, and that success varies by region. In her last
chapter, Jalalzai suggests that the future for women leaders is not quite as
bright as we would hope, arguing that “women’s success is questionable
since the strongest and most visible executive positions continue to
constitute a male reserve” (78). Institutions, executive selection processes
and structures, and women’s cultural status are all intricately tied to
gender. As a whole, these five books would stimulate discussion and
future research in any upper-division undergraduate- or graduate-level
course. Overall, they provide exceptional examples of well written,
methodologically sound, and thought-provoking research on women in
politics and should be part of any scholar’s research collection.

Karen L. Shelby is Professor of Instruction in the Department of Political

Science and International Relations and the Assistant Director of the
Institute for Civil Civic Engagement at the University of San Diego, San
Diego, CA: [email protected]; Noelle H. Norton is Dean of the
College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science and
International Relations at the University of San Diego, San Diego, CA:
[email protected]

REFERENCE
Dunaway, Johanna, Regina G. Lawrence, Melody Rose, and Christopher R. Weber. 2013.
“Traits versus Issues: How Female Candidates Shape Coverage of Senate and
Gubernatorial Races.” Political Research Quarterly 66 (3): 715–26.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.