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Can’t We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics

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Can increasing the number of women in parliament help reduce partisan hostility, and how does their representation influence warmer attitudes toward opposing parties across Western democracies?

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 5, 2024

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This video discusses research on effective polarization—heightened feelings of anger, distrust, and contempt across political party lines—conducted by the author and co-authors Noam Giron and Will Horn. They were motivated by rising political hostility in their respective countries, the United States and Israel. Their research, including a book published in 2020, examines the causes of effective polarization in Western democracies using data until 2017.

A key aspect explored was the potential impact of women politicians on political anger. The author was inspired by discussions with his wife, a psychologist, who highlighted gender differences in political interaction. This video led to a hypothesis that a higher presence of women in political parties might lower animosity towards them.

The research utilized a large data set to analyze the relationship between anger directed at political parties and the proportion of women members in those parties. Findings indicated that parties with more women tended to incite less dislike. While several factors contribute to political opinions, including economic conditions and party policies, the presence of women still played a significant role.

This video concludes that as women gain more representation in politics and society's attitudes toward women in leadership evolve, effective polarization may decrease, leading to more gender-balanced political representation in the future.

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Here are five key points from the video regarding effective polarization and the influence of women in politics:

1. **Definition and Convideo of Effective Polarization**: The researchers, including the authors, have been studying effective polarization, which refers to the negative emotions (anger, distrust, contempt, hatred) that citizens feel toward opposing political parties. This interest arose from political developments in their respective home countries—Israel and the United States—that highlighted increasing political division.

2. **Previous Research and New Hypothesis**: In their 2020 book, the authors explored causes of effective polarization across Western democracies from the mid-1990s to 2017 but did not address the impact of women politicians. Inspired by conversations with the author's psychologist wife, they began investigating whether a higher presence of women in political parties correlates with reduced political anger and hostility.

3. **Research Methodology**: The authors utilized data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems to analyze the relationship between the proportion of women politicians in parties and levels of political hostility towards those parties. They employed a thermometer score to quantitatively measure respondents' feelings towards their party and opposing parties across 20 Western democracies.

4. **Findings**: The study indicated a consistent pattern: political parties with a higher proportion of women members tended to incite less dislike than those dominated by men, even after accounting for other influential factors like economic conditions and party policy positions. This suggests a significant correlation between gender representation in politics and effective polarization.

5. **Expectations for Future Trends**: The authors anticipate that the representation of women in national parliaments will continue to grow, influenced by shifts in societal attitudes toward women in leadership and increasing visibility of women in high-level political positions. This trend may contribute to a reduction in political polarization over time, as female politicians are often associated with less hostility among party supporters.

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Here are some key quotes and themes from the video:

1. **Effective Polarization Definition**:
- "Effective polarization... refers to citizens' feelings of anger, distrust, contempt, and even hatred across party lines."

2. **Personal Motivation**:
- "This was inspired by the fact that all three of us were very upset by the political developments we observed in our home countries."

3. **Research Convideo**:
- "We wrote a book back in 2020, trying to understand the causes of effective polarization across Western democracies."

4. **Underexplored Factors**:
- "One thing that we didn't look at in the book was the possible influence of women and women politicians... on the levels of political anger."

5. **Influence of Gender Dynamics**:
- "My wife... would often ask me if I'd considered the differences in the way that men and women interact."

6. **Research Hypothesis**:
- "Here was this hypothesis that the presence of women politicians might just lower the [levels of] anger and hostility directed at different political parties."

7. **Methodology**:
- "We have a way of measuring people's anger and hostility and distrust towards opposing political parties... [using] a thermometer score."

8. **Impact of January 6th**:
- "The day that the American capital was stormed... people realized that feelings can have consequences and perhaps dangerous and even lethal consequences."

9. **Gender Representation in Politics**:
- "The parties that featured more women members of parliament tended to be less sharply disliked than the parties that featured fewer."

10. **Trends in Women’s Representation**:
- "The representation of women in parliament has been increasing across time, and I would expect that trend to continue."

11. **Changing Perceptions**:
- "The popular resistance against electing women has been melting over the last several decades."

12. **Future Expectations**:
- "As women become more visible in high-level positions... I expect the representation of women in national parliaments to continue to increase."

These quotes encapsulate the main ideas regarding the impact of women in politics on effective polarization and the research process undertaken by the authors. They highlight personal motivations for the research, methodologies used, findings related to gender representation, and broader societal trends.

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My co-authors, Noam Giron and Will Horn

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and I have been working on the topic

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of effective polarization, which refers to citizens',

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feelings of anger, distrust, contempt,

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and even hatred across party lines for several years.

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And this was inspired by the fact that all three

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of us were very upset by the political developments we

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observed in our home countries.

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Will and I are Americans and No is Israeli.

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And in both Israel

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and the United States, we've seen rising levels

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of political anger and hostility across party lines.

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So we've been working on this topic for several years now.

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And, Noam Giron Will Horn

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and I wrote a book back in 2020, trying to understand

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the, causes

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of effective polarization across Western democracies,

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looking at the levels of effective polarization

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from the mid 1990s up until the year 2017, which was

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where the data stopped at the time that we wrote the book

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and trying to relate them to various factors.

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And in the book, we felt we made some progress in building

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up a profile of the types of societies

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that featured more intense political anger.

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And those that featured less.

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However, we couldn't look at everything.

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And one thing that we didn't look at in the book was the

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possible influence of women

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and women politicians, in particular on the levels

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of political anger that we see now, ironically,

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while the three of us are academics,

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and all three of us are professors now, part of the,

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beginning of this research was in

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conversations I had with my wife.

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My wife is a psychologist and a marriage family therapist.

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And whenever I would talk with her about

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how upset I was about the rising levels of anger

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and hostility across party lines,

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she would often ask me if I'd considered the differences in

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the way that men and women interact.

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And she told me that there is widespread,

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research in psychology

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and in the broader field of political communication showing

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that women simply tend to behave differently.

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Well, in listening to her

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and I try very hard to listen to my wife who's an extremely,

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intelligent woman, it occurred to me

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that this was something that we could actually investigate.

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And in Nom Giran, well Horn

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and I had all of the, data already collected on

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how angry people were at different political parties in,

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20 Western democracies.

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This seemed to be something that was worth exploring.

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At that point, we reached out to our friend Diana O'Brien,

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who is one of the world's leading scholars on the topic

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of women and politics,

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and she was very interested in this topic.

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We also invited on a, a couple of other very smart,

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researchers that was Kaitlyn Sink and, David Bracken.

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And we decided that we would actually do the research.

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And we thought that a good first step

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to do this research would be to link the amount of anger

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and hostility directed at different political parties

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with the number

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or proportion of prominent women politicians in

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those political parties.

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So that's where the research came from.

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And like so much academic research,

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it really began this idea that here was this hypothesis that

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the presence of women politicians might just lower the

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temperature, but on the other hand, it might not.

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There are so many other things that can cause people

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to be angry or distrustful

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or on the other hand, perhaps more conciliatory

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and trustful beyond the gender of the politicians

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who they're evaluating.

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Because of this, we thought it was an interesting hypothesis

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to investigate, and that's how we began to study this.

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We really began to see it back in 2018,

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was a fairly lengthy process, gathering the data

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and doing the analysis.

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And it eventually resulted in this, paper

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that appeared in the year 2020.

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We have a way of measuring people's, anger and hostility

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and distrust towards opposing political parties,

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which quite frankly is a blunt instrument,

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but it's all we have if we want

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to study this question across a large number of countries

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and also over a long time period.

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Um, and this instrument

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that we use is something called a thermometer score,

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where in these national surveys,

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survey respondents are asked first,

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what political party do you support?

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Uh, and then after that, they're asked

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to rate their own political party,

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but also opposing political parties on the scale

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that runs from zero to 10, where zero indicates

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that the most cold feelings five is neutral,

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and 10 is, the warmest possible feelings.

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So that was the measure that we used.

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Of course, that only stalls the question by one click

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because what does the content of a negative

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or cold rating actually indicate?

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There are so many things that could indicate including say,

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policy disagreements with a particular politician

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or a political party.

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Alternatively, one might question their competence

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or their ethics, or one might more broadly question their

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character and see these people

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as being simply maligned forces

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or quite simply evil people

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who perhaps have authoritarian tendencies, or who have

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otherwise bad intentions that we don't know.

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Based on the research that we did, I'll mention

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that this topic of effective polarization is relatively new.

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Um, up until about three

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or four years ago, there were not very many

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of us working on this, particularly

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outside the United States.

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United, I can give you the precise state.

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When all that changed January 6th, 2021,

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the day that the American capital was stormed prior to that,

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the reaction of a lot of scholars to the research

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that Nom Giron and Will Horn and I

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and others were doing was essentially, well, you seem

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to be studying people's feelings

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and, you know, people's feelings aren't

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really very important.

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We don't need to worry about people's feelings

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after January 6th.

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I think a lot of people change their mind.

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They suddenly realize that feelings can have consequences

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and perhaps dangerous and even lethal consequences.

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But to get back to your broader question there,

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we don't know precisely

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what these negative feelings are in the research that we do.

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We know or we feel we can measure how coldly

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or how warmly people feel towards their opponents.

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The precise content of those cold or warm feelings.

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We don't know. We strongly suspect that it's tied up

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to a mixture of distrust, contempt, disdain,

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fear, and even hatred.

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But exactly where those feelings come from

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and which ones they are is something that we haven't,

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made much progress in understanding so far.

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The hypothesis means that,

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people are expected to evaluate their political opponents,

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opposing political parties more warmly.

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If the party they're evaluating has a larger proportion

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of women members of parliament in the United States,

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that would mean that they have a larger share

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of women in Congress in Britain,

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that they have a larger share of women in the House

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of Commons and so on.

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So that's the hypothesis,

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and that's what we set out to test.

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The data that we used in order

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to evaluate this hypothesis began with this very large set

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of surveys,

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that are collectively labeled the comparative study

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of electoral systems.

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And these are surveys that have been conducted

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that have been collected, across 40

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or 50 countries since the mid 1990s.

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And, we analyzed our data in 20 Western democracies

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and, the countries that we looked at were, well,

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the United States and every other major democracy.

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In these surveys, we collect data,

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on the survey respondent's party support,

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which political party they identify with.

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And then we also collected their ratings of their own party

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and the, the parties of all the other parties in the system

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that is all of their political opponents on this

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zero to 10 scale.

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So by collecting those data, we had measures of

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how disliked all political parties were by all

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of their political opponents,

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how much Republicans disliked Democrat,

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the Democratic Party,

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Democrats disliked the Republican party,

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conservatives disliked the Labor Party in

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Britain and so forth.

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So that was the data that we had from the comparative study

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of electoral systems to collect the data on the

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proportion of women members

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of parliament in each of these parties.

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Well, we had some data sources,

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but we had to gather some of that data, ourselves.

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And in most cases, it was fairly easy to collect the names

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of all these members of parliament.

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Some of the names were very clearly associated with men

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and women some less clearly.

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So in which case we had to do more detective work.

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So the collection of the data on the proportion of men

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and women in the, in the various parties,

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that was actually quite time consuming the data from the

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comparative study of electoral systems.

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That's fairly easy. It's all up there, uploaded.

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We simply had to download the data.

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We then decided to simply check once we had the data on the

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proportion of, women members

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of parliament in each party, we looked

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to see whether there was in fact a pattern in which the

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parties that featured a larger proportion of women members

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of parliament did in fact seem

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to incite less dislike than the parties

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that were documented by men.

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Now, one interesting feature of this

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that will probably not surprise anyone is that most

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of these parties across the entire period we looked at from

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1996 through 2017,

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typically featured more men than women in their

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parliamentary delegations

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because women back in the mid 1990s

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and even today, are underrepresented in parliaments even

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though, the proportion of women members

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of parliament has been increasing over that period.

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So for the most part, the parliamentary delegations

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that we looked at from the different political parties,

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some of them featured a roughly even

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balance of men and women.

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Some were dominated by men.

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There were a very small number of parliamentary delegations

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that featured a significantly greater number of women,

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but far, far more featured a greater number of men.

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Overall, the proportion

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of women in these parliamentary delegations was a little bit

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below 30%,

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although, as I mentioned, it did increase

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across this period.

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So we checked

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and we wanted to see what the pattern looked like.

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And long story short, what we found that was in

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that indeed there was a pattern that was consistent

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with our hypothesis.

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Namely, the parties that featured more women members

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of parliament tended

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to be less sharply disliked than the parties that featured,

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fewer, women members of parliament.

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Now, of course, the analysis

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that we did was somewhat more complicated than that

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because there are many factors that contribute

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to a party being liked

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and disliked beyond the proportion of women in

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that they feature in their parliamentary delegation.

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Some of the other features that have been found

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to matter if you're trying to predict these things, are

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national economic conditions.

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People tend to be angrier and express more disdain

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and hostility towards their opponents when the economy is in

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a recession than when the economy is strong.

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Uh, you, as you would also guess, it also depends

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on party's policy positions

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and in particular, if a party has taken less popular

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positions with respect to prominent issues,

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debates over economic policy

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or cultural policy, that will affect

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how popular the party is.

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And in particular, there's research suggesting

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that in recent years,

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these cultural policy debates over issues such

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as immigration, abortion, gay marriage,

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and so forth, that these tend

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to make people especially angry.

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And in the words of another political scientist,

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these cultural issues are debates over who we are.

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Economic debates are over who gets

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what you can compromise over who gets what.

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It's much more difficult to compromise over who we are.

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So we had to account for those things.

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Other studies have shown that there are other factors,

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that affect, these, party's degree

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of popularity, or unpopularity.

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And finally I'll mention that if you're trying

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to figure out how well the partisans of a given party,

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like the other party, you need

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to take into account governing coalition arrangements.

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If you have two parties, for example,

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that are jointly governing the country,

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then the supporters of each party tend

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to feel more warmly towards the other party.

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Similarly, if two parties are both in opposition,

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the members of each party tend to feel more and warmly.

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However, if one party's in government

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and the other's in opposition, then all else equal,

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the parties tend to feel,

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much more coldly towards each other, presumably

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because they're constantly debating

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and arguing with each other across the island parliament.

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So we had to take all those factors into account,

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and indeed we found that these other factors matter too.

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There's a big effect related to,

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the party's policy positions.

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There's also a very large effect, relating

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to these governing coalition arrangements, for example.

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Um, but even accounting for these other factors,

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there was a consistent detectable effect.

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Parties that had more women elicited less hostility than

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parties that were dominated by men.

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The representation of women in parliament has been

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increasing across time,

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and I would expect that trend to continue.

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And notably, there are some political parties,

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especially over the past 10 years on the left.

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These tend to be green parties

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and social democratic parties

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that have actually instituted formal gender

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quotas for their candidates.

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That is that they need to have an even mix of, male

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and female candidates,

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or sometimes the quota is not set precisely at 50%.

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But the point is that there are some parties

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that have formally committed that they're going

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to nominate a significant number of women candidates.

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For that reason, I expect the representation of women

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to continue to grow over time.

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There's one other factor which is really outside of,

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our own research and in some ways the field of politics,

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that there's this increasing trend,

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particularly in the United States, among young people,

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that young men are struggling compared

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to young women at the university

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where I teach now the University of California Davis,

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roughly 60% of the undergraduate students are women.

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And indeed across universities in the United States,

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women sharply outnumber men.

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Women also are achieving better academic success

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among those who do go to college.

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It seems therefore that women are highly likely to continue

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to rise within all different fields, not simply politics,

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but also the law, science,

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education business, and so on.

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As women continue to succeed

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and as the younger women in our society, grow older

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and to the ages age where they're likely

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to hold national office, it seems likely that the proportion

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of women, elected officials

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will rise over time.

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One additional factor that surely contributes to this is

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that the popular resistance against

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electing women has been melting over the

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last several decades.

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The proportion of people, for example,

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in public opinion polls who state that they feel

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that women should not hold elective office,

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or that, men tend to be better qualified than women

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has been shrinking dramatically over

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the past several decades.

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For all of this reason, I expect the representation

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of women in national parliaments to continue to increase.

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Notably, of course, we have seen a number

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of prominent women leaders, at the level of,

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president in the United, in, of, president

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or in many cases, prime minister in Britain.

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Of course, you've had Margaret Thatcher

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and Theresa May, you had Angela Merkel, who,

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was dubbed until she stepped down,

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after, 2021, the most powerful woman in the world.

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Uh, you had Hillary Clinton

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who won the popular vote in 2016,

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but lost the electoral college.

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And of course, it's quite possible

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that three years from now we will have an American

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President-elect, Kamala Harris.

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So as women become more visible in high level positions such

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as members of Parliament

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and in the very top position as Prime Minister

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or possibly president of the United States, I expect

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that any remaining resistance to the notion

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that women can be effective leaders

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and can contribute

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to our national politics will continue to erode.

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And I fully expect that within 30

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or 40 years, hopefully I will live long enough to see it.

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We will see national parliaments,

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and governing cabinets

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that are essentially gender equal.

Exploring Effective Polarization and Gender's Role in Political Anger

00:00:00 - My co-authors, Noam Giron and Will Horn and I have been working on the topic of effective polarization, which refers to citizens', feelings of anger, distrust, contempt, and even hatred across party lines for several years. And this was inspired by the fact that all three of us were very upset by the political developments we observed in our home countries. Will and I are Americans and No is Israeli. And in both Israel

00:00:33 - of political anger and hostility across party lines. So we've been working on this topic for several years now. And, Noam Giron Will Horn and I wrote a book back in 2020, trying to understand the, causes of effective polarization across Western democracies, looking at the levels of effective polarization from the mid 1990s up until the year 2017, which was

00:01:06 - and trying to relate them to various factors. And in the book, we felt we made some progress in building up a profile of the types of societies that featured more intense political anger. And those that featured less. However, we couldn't look at everything. And one thing that we didn't look at in the book was the possible influence of women and women politicians, in particular on the levels of political anger that we see now, ironically,

Exploring Gender Differences in Political Polarization

00:01:37 - and all three of us are professors now, part of the, beginning of this research was in conversations I had with my wife. My wife is a psychologist and a marriage family therapist. And whenever I would talk with her about how upset I was about the rising levels of anger and hostility across party lines, she would often ask me if I'd considered the differences in the way that men and women interact.

00:02:08 - research in psychology and in the broader field of political communication showing that women simply tend to behave differently. Well, in listening to her and I try very hard to listen to my wife who's an extremely, intelligent woman, it occurred to me that this was something that we could actually investigate. And in Nom Giran, well Horn and I had all of the, data already collected on

00:02:39 - 20 Western democracies. This seemed to be something that was worth exploring. At that point, we reached out to our friend Diana O'Brien, who is one of the world's leading scholars on the topic of women and politics, and she was very interested in this topic. We also invited on a, a couple of other very smart, researchers that was Kaitlyn Sink and, David Bracken.

Linking Women Politicians to Political Hostility

00:03:09 - And we thought that a good first step to do this research would be to link the amount of anger and hostility directed at different political parties with the number or proportion of prominent women politicians in those political parties. So that's where the research came from. And like so much academic research, it really began this idea that here was this hypothesis that the presence of women politicians might just lower the

00:03:41 - There are so many other things that can cause people to be angry or distrustful or on the other hand, perhaps more conciliatory and trustful beyond the gender of the politicians who they're evaluating. Because of this, we thought it was an interesting hypothesis to investigate, and that's how we began to study this. We really began to see it back in 2018, was a fairly lengthy process, gathering the data

00:04:10 - And it eventually resulted in this, paper that appeared in the year 2020. We have a way of measuring people's, anger and hostility and distrust towards opposing political parties, which quite frankly is a blunt instrument, but it's all we have if we want to study this question across a large number of countries and also over a long time period. and this instrument that we use is something called a thermometer score, where in these national surveys,

Measuring Political Sentiments: A Thermometer Approach

00:04:42 - what political party do you support? and then after that, they're asked to rate their own political party, but also opposing political parties on the scale that runs from zero to 10, where zero indicates that the most cold feelings five is neutral, and 10 is, the warmest possible feelings. So that was the measure that we used. Of course, that only stalls the question by one click because what does the content of a negative

00:05:12 - There are so many things that could indicate including say, policy disagreements with a particular politician or a political party. Alternatively, one might question their competence or their ethics, or one might more broadly question their character and see these people as being simply maligned forces or quite simply evil people who perhaps have authoritarian tendencies, or who have otherwise bad intentions that we don't know.

00:05:44 - that this topic of effective polarization is relatively new. up until about three or four years ago, there were not very many of us working on this, particularly outside the United States. United, I can give you the precise state. When all that changed January 6th, 2021, the day that the American capital was stormed prior to that, the reaction of a lot of scholars to the research that Nom Giron and Will Horn and I

The Impact of Emotional Polarization in Politics

00:06:16 - to be studying people's feelings and, you know, people's feelings aren't really very important. We don't need to worry about people's feelings after January 6th. I think a lot of people change their mind. They suddenly realize that feelings can have consequences and perhaps dangerous and even lethal consequences. But to get back to your broader question there, we don't know precisely what these negative feelings are in the research that we do.

00:06:48 - or how warmly people feel towards their opponents. The precise content of those cold or warm feelings. We don't know. We strongly suspect that it's tied up to a mixture of distrust, contempt, disdain, fear, and even hatred. But exactly where those feelings come from and which ones they are is something that we haven't, made much progress in understanding so far.

00:07:19 - people are expected to evaluate their political opponents, opposing political parties more warmly. If the party they're evaluating has a larger proportion of women members of parliament in the United States, that would mean that they have a larger share of women in Congress in Britain, that they have a larger share of women in the House of Commons and so on. So that's the hypothesis,

Analyzing Political Polarization Through Comparative Surveys

00:07:47 - The data that we used in order to evaluate this hypothesis began with this very large set of surveys, that are collectively labeled the comparative study of electoral systems. And these are surveys that have been conducted that have been collected, across 40 or 50 countries since the mid 1990s. And, we analyzed our data in 20 Western democracies and, the countries that we looked at were, well,

00:08:21 - In these surveys, we collect data, on the survey respondent's party support, which political party they identify with. And then we also collected their ratings of their own party and the, the parties of all the other parties in the system that is all of their political opponents on this zero to 10 scale. So by collecting those data, we had measures of

00:08:53 - of their political opponents, how much Republicans disliked Democrat, the Democratic Party, Democrats disliked the Republican party, conservatives disliked the Labor Party in Britain and so forth. So that was the data that we had from the comparative study of electoral systems to collect the data on the proportion of women members of parliament in each of these parties. Well, we had some data sources,

Analyzing Gender Representation in Parliamentary Data

00:09:23 - And in most cases, it was fairly easy to collect the names of all these members of parliament. Some of the names were very clearly associated with men and women some less clearly. So in which case we had to do more detective work. So the collection of the data on the proportion of men and women in the, in the various parties, that was actually quite time consuming the data from the comparative study of electoral systems.

00:09:54 - We simply had to download the data. We then decided to simply check once we had the data on the proportion of, women members of parliament in each party, we looked to see whether there was in fact a pattern in which the parties that featured a larger proportion of women members of parliament did in fact seem to incite less dislike than the parties that were documented by men.

00:10:24 - that will probably not surprise anyone is that most of these parties across the entire period we looked at from 1996 through 2017, typically featured more men than women in their parliamentary delegations because women back in the mid 1990s and even today, are underrepresented in parliaments even though, the proportion of women members of parliament has been increasing over that period.

Gender Balance and Political Affinity

00:10:56 - that we looked at from the different political parties, some of them featured a roughly even balance of men and women. Some were dominated by men. There were a very small number of parliamentary delegations that featured a significantly greater number of women, but far, far more featured a greater number of men. Overall, the proportion of women in these parliamentary delegations was a little bit below 30%,

00:11:25 - across this period. So we checked and we wanted to see what the pattern looked like. And long story short, what we found that was in that indeed there was a pattern that was consistent with our hypothesis. Namely, the parties that featured more women members of parliament tended to be less sharply disliked than the parties that featured, fewer, women members of parliament. Now, of course, the analysis

00:11:57 - because there are many factors that contribute to a party being liked and disliked beyond the proportion of women in that they feature in their parliamentary delegation. Some of the other features that have been found to matter if you're trying to predict these things, are national economic conditions. People tend to be angrier and express more disdain and hostility towards their opponents when the economy is in

Impact of Party Policies on Public Sentiment

00:12:26 - you, as you would also guess, it also depends on party's policy positions and in particular, if a party has taken less popular positions with respect to prominent issues, debates over economic policy or cultural policy, that will affect how popular the party is. And in particular, there's research suggesting that in recent years, these cultural policy debates over issues such as immigration, abortion, gay marriage,

00:13:00 - to make people especially angry. And in the words of another political scientist, these cultural issues are debates over who we are. Economic debates are over who gets what you can compromise over who gets what. It's much more difficult to compromise over who we are. So we had to account for those things. Other studies have shown that there are other factors, that affect, these, party's degree of popularity, or unpopularity.

00:13:34 - to figure out how well the partisans of a given party, like the other party, you need to take into account governing coalition arrangements. If you have two parties, for example, that are jointly governing the country, then the supporters of each party tend to feel more warmly towards the other party. Similarly, if two parties are both in opposition, the members of each party tend to feel more and warmly.

Impact of Women Politicians on Political Hostility

00:14:03 - and the other's in opposition, then all else equal, the parties tend to feel, much more coldly towards each other, presumably because they're constantly debating and arguing with each other across the island parliament. So we had to take all those factors into account, and indeed we found that these other factors matter too. There's a big effect related to, the party's policy positions. There's also a very large effect, relating

00:14:36 - but even accounting for these other factors, there was a consistent detectable effect. Parties that had more women elicited less hostility than parties that were dominated by men. The representation of women in parliament has been increasing across time, and I would expect that trend to continue. And notably, there are some political parties, especially over the past 10 years on the left. These tend to be green parties

00:15:06 - that have actually instituted formal gender quotas for their candidates. That is that they need to have an even mix of, male and female candidates, or sometimes the quota is not set precisely at 50%. But the point is that there are some parties that have formally committed that they're going to nominate a significant number of women candidates. For that reason, I expect the representation of women to continue to grow over time.

Rising Female Representation in Education and Politics

00:15:38 - our own research and in some ways the field of politics, that there's this increasing trend, particularly in the United States, among young people, that young men are struggling compared to young women at the university where I teach now the University of California Davis, roughly 60% of the undergraduate students are women. And indeed across universities in the United States, women sharply outnumber men.

00:16:10 - among those who do go to college. It seems therefore that women are highly likely to continue to rise within all different fields, not simply politics, but also the law, science, education business, and so on. As women continue to succeed and as the younger women in our society, grow older and to the ages age where they're likely to hold national office, it seems likely that the proportion

00:16:42 - will rise over time. One additional factor that surely contributes to this is that the popular resistance against electing women has been melting over the last several decades. The proportion of people, for example, in public opinion polls who state that they feel that women should not hold elective office, or that, men tend to be better qualified than women has been shrinking dramatically over

Anticipating Gender Equality in Political Leadership

00:17:11 - For all of this reason, I expect the representation of women in national parliaments to continue to increase. Notably, of course, we have seen a number of prominent women leaders, at the level of, president in the United, in, of, president or in many cases, prime minister in Britain. Of course, you've had Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, you had Angela Merkel, who, was dubbed until she stepped down,

00:17:45 - you had Hillary Clinton who won the popular vote in 2016, but lost the electoral college. And of course, it's quite possible that three years from now we will have an American President-elect, Kamala Harris. So as women become more visible in high level positions such as members of Parliament and in the very top position as Prime Minister or possibly president of the United States, I expect

00:18:34 - that women can be effective leaders and can contribute to our national politics will continue to erode. And I fully expect that within 30 or 40 years, hopefully I will live long enough to see it. We will see national parliaments, and governing cabinets that are essentially gender equal.

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