https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/09/in-tuesdays-elections-women-won-big-here-are-three-things-we-learned-about-women-and-politics/?utm_term=.9b138e11f410
Jennifer Lawless, who cowrote the book with Richard Fox from which we read excerpts a couple of classes ago, wrote a response to the Nov 7 elections for the Washington Post that had a bit more of an uplifting tone than we got from her in the reading. To recall what we read, the core statements that could be drawn from Chapters 2 and 6 were that (1) it's more likely that US will fall behind other countries in the gender gap than improve its relative progress on the global spectrum (last page in Ch. 2 but page numbers were cut off), and (2) female politicians tend to be members of the Democratic party.
In this article, Lawless again points out fact that when the Republican Party is in power, women tend to see far fewer gains in elections, as well as the fact that many women who ran did so because of Trump's election. Yet as we saw in her article, the distribution of female party affiliation in the U.S. does not nearly match up. Is it really the case that the GOP still possesses residual sexist conservatism to such a degree that its women feel that much less inclined to run? It's easy to accept that as true when we focus on the social values and issues that are typically associated with the Republican Party, like abortion, birth control, or affirmative action; yet seeing the distribution of American women's party alignment indicates that the same effect we've read about from the '60s where women weren't even aware of their inequality or at least comfortable acknowledging it. There still exists a sizable minority (33% as of 2016 according to Forbes) of women who insist that the U.S. has no gender inequality, but even if we assume that this percentage is made up of all Republican women, what's holding them back from running? If women are really equal to men in America, then why wouldn't women want to go into politics?
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