Gender Roles & Political Participation
By
elementary school, boys and girls have established autonomous peer cultures[1]. Children are educated throughout their young lives to maintain a social
equilibrium by acting within their appropriate social, or gender, roles. These
gender roles affect what men and women do every day in their personal and
professional lives, as well as the level involvement individuals have in the
political sphere.
Studies
have shown that women are less involved in politics than men are. Traditional
gender socialization has discouraged women from entering the political arena
because they are unaccustomed to the political environment [2]. Women tend
to believe that they are less capable and unqualified for political involvement
because of traditional gender socialization. Even when women are qualified and
capable of being politically involved, they tend to be recruited far less than
men are. When women are involved in politics, they provide stability to
political organizations because they are focused on internal maintenance. Women
are also just as successful and capable as men are and perform their duties
just as well.
A study of
the model United Nations was done in 1999, where male and female delegates were
selected to participate in the event. These individuals signed up for the event
voluntarily; however, Rosenthal, Rosenthal, and Jones found that male delegates
still participated more than the female delegates did [3]. I believe that these
female delegates may have participated less due to uncertainty of the event’s
dynamics and expectations. In order to test this theory, I looked at an
organization comprised of undergraduate students that had relatively low
turnover from 2012 to 2013 and examined the differences of male and female
participation.
Study
The
Intermountain Affiliate of College and University Residence Halls (IACURH)
meets three times a year to do regional business. The organization is comprised
of thirty-one universities and colleges from the intermountain region, serves
as an advocate for on-campus residence halls, and is one of eight regions in
the National Association of College and University Residence Halls,
Incorporated (NACURH, inc.). Undergraduate students are the main participants
in the organization, though some graduate students also participate. I recorded
portions of the annual “No Frills” business conference at the University of
Arizona where twenty-two schools and ninety-nine delegates were present.
At this
conference, I recorded five different sessions of “award bid defense” where
candidates were presented for awards and representatives from each school
debated to decide which candidate would win the award. Each session was a
different mixture of male and female delegates, depending upon who the school
selected to represent them in that session. Many of the sessions had more
female delegates than male delegates. Some sessions had multiple candidates for
the award and others only had one candidate. Levels of experience were also
gathered based on how many boardroom experiences the individual had, including
the current conference. Three sessions were comprised of the delegates from the
conference, while four of the sessions were comprised of the regionally elected
executives. I wanted to see the difference in how campus elected individuals
and regionally elected individuals acted when put in these situations. I also
recorded two “post-no frills” bid sessions for the regionally elected
individuals.
Findings
For the
campus elected delegates, I found that men tended to speak more than the women
did. In one session, there were three guys to twelve girls, but those three men
spoke, on average, 3.33 times, while the girls spoke, on average, 2.83 times. In
another session, there were seven men to ten women and the men spoke nearly
twice as much as the women did. I found that in the last session men and women
spoke about the same number of times and there were ten women and ten men
present. I thought it was interesting
that men spoke up more than women when they were outnumbered, which reaffirms
the gender stereotype that men try to establish dominance and control. I also
found it interesting that women were not overpowered when the playing field was
an even number of men and women. When looking closer at this last session, I
found that nine of the ten females were “experienced,” meaning that this was at
least their second boardroom experience, and only four of the ten males were
experienced. I also noted that the inexperienced males spoke up more than the
experienced males, but it was just the opposite for the women.
When
looking at the regionally elected executives, there were varying results. There
are five men on the regional board and two women, and only two individuals are
deemed “experienced,” meaning this is their second term as a regional executive
(a term being defined as one academic year): one male and one female. In the
two bid sessions, the two women spoke more than the five men did. Within the
same sessions, the experienced male spoke more than any other individual and
the inexperienced males spoke less than everyone else. In the two post-no
frills bid sessions, the men and women spoke about the same number of times
with the experienced male still speaking the most. In two of these five bid
sessions, the inexperienced female spoke the second highest number of times
(after the experienced male).
Do gender roles affect political participation?
I believe
that they do. It was very clear in this study that the males tried to assert
dominance over the conversation and spoke more than the females did, even if
the females were more experienced than the males were. Inexperience does not
always seem to affect men in terms of willingness to speak, though inexperience
can affect whether or not a woman is willing to speak. Gender roles appear to
have a large effect on how individuals act.
Sources
[1] Adler, Patricia, Steven Kless, and Peter Adler.
1992. Socialization to gender roles: Popularity among elementary school boys and girls, Sociology of Education 65, no. 3(July): 169-87.
[2] Fox, Richard, and Jennifer Lawless. 2010. If only they’d ask: Gender, recruitment, and political ambition, The Journal of Politics 72, no. 2(April): 310-26.
[3] Rosenthal, Cindy S., Jocelyn Jones, and James A. Rosenthal. 2003. Gendered discourse in the political behavior of adolescents, Political Research
Quarterly 56, no. 1 (September): 97-104.
