Going all-in: gender and campaign commitment

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that women overcome the potential negative impact of gender stereotypes by emerging when they are stronger candidates than men. I leverage an original survey of state legislative candidates to determine whether women devote more time to their campaigns. I find that women on the whole, and those who had previously been elected to a political office in particular, invested more of their personal time into the campaign than men. This difference is driven by the fact that women are more likely to forgo employment during the election. These findings suggest that women are more likely than men to arrange their personal obligations in such a fashion that they can run stronger campaigns.

Do Local Party Chairs Think Women and Minority Candidates Can Win? Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

“…In the real world, occupation, military service, and political experience are correlated with gender; in our experiment they were not. Another explanation for the absence of gender effects is tied to recent work that finds that women are more strategic (Fulton et al 2006;Pearson and McGhee 2013) when it comes to the decision to enter politics and therefore tend to be higher-quality (Fulton 2012(Fulton , 2014, harder-working (Miller 2015) candidates relative to men. The null effect of gender in our analysis might therefore reflect chairs' expectations that women who choose to run tend to be strong candidates.…”

The Effect of Gender on Interruptions at Congressional Hearings

“…When seeking office, women face hurdles that men do not (Lawless and Pearson 2008; Milyo and Schosberg 2000), and they may work harder on the campaign trail to compensate for these disadvantages (Jenkins 2007; Miller 2015). These dynamics change little once women assume office.…”