A timely visit: Jennifer Lawless speaks on why women should run for office
A timely visit: Jennifer Lawless speaks on why women should run for office
Students in Melissa Haussman’s fourth-year seminar, Gender and Politics in North America, recently had the opportunity to meet Jennifer Lawless, Associate Professor of Government at American University in Washington, DC, and former candidate for the Democratic nomination in Rhode Island.
Jennifer Lawless
Lawless’ goal is to encourage more women to run for political office, and her message to her listeners is this: women are just as deserving, qualified and capable of winning office as men.
And she’s got the experience and done the research to prove it.
In 2006 — at the age of 30, just five years over the minimum required age — she ran for the Democratic nomination in Rhode Island.
She’s also the co-author of It Still Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office, with Richard L. Fox – originally published in 2005. In a revised edition published last year by Cambridge University Press, Lawless and Fox re-surveyed 4,000 activists, lawyers, private sector workers and educators — four political “pipeline” fields – and determined that, despite having identical resumes and qualifications, women were one-third less likely to consider themselves qualified than men to run for office and thus half as likely to actually run, even though evidence shows that “when women run, they win” – in equal proportion to their male counterparts.
Lawless used many of her own experiences in running for office, often with humour and vivacity, to convey her message, stressing the importance of staying positive and focused.
Lawless’ visit also included an address, via video-conference, to attendees at the American consulates in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax, as well as a speaking engagement at the National Equal Voice Tenth-Year Anniversary Summit of Women and Politics. (Equal Voice is the only multi-partisan Canadian organization dedicated to electing more women.) Her visit also highlighted the work of Carleton students Mary Anne Carter, Rebecca Plumadore, Paroma Raychaudri and Keisha Thompson, who, with others, founded an Equal Voice chapter at Carleton University.