Cao says she worries that analyzing the issue of gender imbalance may devolve into perpetuating stereotypes about gender roles. But Hannah Riley Bowles, an associate professor at the Kennedy School who studies gender and leadership, says that research has exposed the influence of generalizations about gender in elections. According to Bowles, the door-to-door technique that Cao, Fabrizio, and Zhu have found successful requires candidates to be “self-promoters”—a trait that people generally find “socially unattractive” in women, she adds.
“We don’t like it when women say, ‘I should do this because I’m smart and political,’” Bowles says.
NOT A CERTAIN “TYPE”
When she first arrived at Harvard, Cao—the only woman currently running for UC president or vice president—says she initially decided to abandon her high school commitment to student government, thinking the UC just wasn’t the right fit for her.
“In my naive freshman head, I thought the people who run for the UC at Harvard are the future senators and super-intense people,” Cao says.
Because there are few visible women in student and even national government leadership positions, Marine says she worries that a lack of role models prevents undergraduate women from seeing themselves as viable candidates. Both Fabrizio and Cao say they needed encouragement from peers and UC leaders before they felt ready to be on the UC ballot.
According to Bowles, the phenomenon of even the most qualified women candidates shying away from the public arena is pervasive in politics. In fact, Bowles adds, the average woman is less likely to run for office than an equally qualified man, given the social pressures on women candidates. But there might be a simple solution to reversing the problem for the UC: simply asking every Council member to approach two or three women as potential candidates could ease women’s anxiety about running for leadership positions, Bowles says.
“It’s more risky for women than men to put themselves out there and self-promote,” Bowles says. “When a woman gets asked to run, she can say that [she is] running because of other people. The biggest bang for your buck is asking women to run.”
THINKING STRATEGICALLY
This fall’s UC election is not the first time Council leadership has worked to amend gender imbalance. For the past few years, the UC has tried to encourage women to run by hosting campaign workshops at the Women’s Center.
According to UC Vice President Eric N. Hysen ’11, the Council has recently taken additional measures to address the problem. Last month, Council leaders organized a meeting with active members of the Women’s Center to discuss skewed gender representation. Cao says that the Council will consider the proposals that came out of the meeting, which include actively recruiting women to run for the Council and hosting workshops on effective campaigning for women.
Fabrizio adds that the UC will also target women to run in special elections to fill open seats and as upperclassman candidates in House elections—both of which, for freshmen, take place after the pressures of being new to Harvard dissipates. Already this year, one new woman has joined the Council through a special election victory.
“I think this year is an especially stark reminder that we can’t just offer one campaign workshop in the Women’s Center and think that will solve it,” Marine says. “We are starting to think strategically.”
—Staff writer Stephanie B. Garlock can be reached at sgarlock@college.harvard.edu.