Has anyone ever told you that you should run for public office? If you’re a man, the odds of the answer being “yes” are much higher.
When political scientists Richard Fox and Jennifer Lawless first discovered how much less likely women were than men to consider running for office, I hadn’t even been born yet. Twenty years later, the gap hasn’t changed.
Qualified women are still just as unlikely to run compared to qualified men when it comes to considering running for office. In 2001, it was 59% of men versus 43% of women. In 2021, it was 57% of men versus 40% of women.
Part of the solution is something anyone can do: encourage the women around you to run.
Since 2001, the number of women in Congress has roughly doubled. After Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and Kamala Harris became vice president, many assumed more women would want to run for public office. However, although more women were elected, this ambition wasn’t trickling down because of a representation paradox where high-profile female candidacies also generate high-profile sexism and attacks on those women. Nearly 90% of the women surveyed said that female candidates face more scrutiny.
The first reason is internal. Men are more likely to say they are “very qualified” to run, whereas women are twice as likely to call themselves “not at all qualified.”
“There’s a lot of great research that shows that these gender norms about politics as a masculine space (are) adopted really young,” government Ph.D. candidate HeartLee Harman said.
The second is external. The gap between the encouragement from family and friends for women versus men turned out to be the largest.
Public health senior Sarah Sheriff, who ran for student body president for 2026-27, said she spent a year trying to convince a friend to run for student government.
“She was like, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to do that,’” Sheriff said. “By the end of the campaign, after working with our team, she was like, ‘You know what? This was so much fun. I want to go and do that.’”
Women are becoming more educated and more qualified, but we are less likely to consider running for office because we still see a world where sexism is loud, making politics look worse for women than it is. When Sheriff ran, one man told her women can be “liked or respected,” but not both.
“People assume that voters hate women and would never vote for a woman, or at least there’s a substantial part of America that isn’t ready for a woman president, for instance,” Harman said. “But that’s not what the research shows. When they run, they win at similar rates.”
Sexism shouldn’t stop qualified women from running. Let the loudest message be “you’d be great at this,” so it can eclipse what women hear all too often — “this is going to be brutal.”
Say it out loud. Tell your friend she’d make a great politician one day, or even that she should run for student government. Encouragement costs nothing, but it has the power to change everything.
If nobody has ever told you to run, this is me telling you that you should.
Thakkar is a government junior from Winter Park, Florida.
