The political parenthood trap

How focus on families can hold women back in politics

In case you missed it, a Republican candidate for a competitive Congressional seat (Virginia’s 7th District), Derrick Anderson, has photos of himself and a fake family available on his YouTube page and on the National Republican Campaign Committee’s websites. The caption of the photo in the New York Times story read, “Derrick Anderson, who is running for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District, in a photo with the wife and children of a longtime friend.” It’s wild that someone thought a photo-op with a borrowed family was a good idea. But Anderson, who is unmarried and has no children, is currently running for office as his party suggests people without children don’t have a stake in this country. So running in this environment likely sparked the hairbrained idea. 

It's been interesting to see something – that something being family, parenting and issues related to both – that typically flanks women who run for office turned on men (albeit to much less consequence). So I thought I’d dedicate a post to summarizing some research on this topic that helps us understand how male and female candidates for office navigate the personal when it's political, and why that terrain still favors men.  

How focus on families can hold women back in politics

Fewer women run because of familial obligations 

Family demands contribute to fewer women running for office. Married women are less likely to seek office than married men. According to a study by Melody Crowder-Meyer, married men are more likely than married women to say they want to run for office: “[W]hen a man moves from being unmarried to married, his predicted probability of expressing political ambition quadruples—from 6% to nearly 30%. In contrast, being married is statistically unrelated to women’s likelihood of expressing political ambition.” Thus, marriage uniquely affects men’s and women’s interest in running for office.

Why? Many reasons, but here are some. The caregiving gap in the U.S. refers to the disproportionate amount of unpaid caregiving and household work that women perform compared to men, even when both partners contribute financially in opposite sex couples. Women spend about twice as much time as men on unpaid labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and caregiving according to the Gender Equity Policy Institute. And according to Pew, 59% of women say they do more household chores than their partner (6% say their partner does more). Among men, 20% say they do more (34% say their spouse or partner does more) (The remaining share say these responsibilities are shared about equally). These caregiving imbalances persist despite women’s entrance into the workforce and their financial contributions to their families.  

As such, women are more likely to weigh their family-life when thinking about running for office. One telling poll of “professionals” found that 65 percent of women believe that having children makes it more difficult to run for public office, whereas only 3 percent of men agreed. Although this is shifting (more men today want to spend time with their families), women still find that they are responsible for the majority of the care work (their own children but also aging parents).

Drawing attention to family is a double edge sword

Social Role Theory explains that gender norms lead to social expectations about how individuals should behave (or what they have license to do). In the US (and nearly everywhere) gender norms prescribe a breadwinning role for men, while women’s primary role is in the home. In politics, women who run for office are seen as acting outside their prescribed gender role because they belong at home, and as a result, women running for office have contended with prejudicial attitudes about their fitness for office simply because they are women. 

This dynamic also highlights the so-called "unexplainable" unlikability of women running for president, as Lori Cox Han at Chapman University puts it. Studies reveal that female candidates who step outside traditional gender norms by exhibiting traits seen as unfeminine tend to face voter backlash. This is because women in politics are incongruent with their social role as wives and mothers, and this inconsistency lowers evaluations of them.

But if women who run for office talk about their roles as wives or as mothers they step out of the “politics role” and into “caregiving role,” leading them to now be incongruent with the role that they are campaigning to occupy. One experiment manipulated candidates’ parental statuses and found that participants indicate men with young children are more politically viable than women with young children. The study concluded: “This line of research suggests that gender role expectations and family obligations are more salient for political women than for political men. Women are constrained by family responsibilities and must negotiate their private lives in ways that men do not.”

A more recent experiment found that respondents favor candidates with families (regardless of the candidates’ genders), so a family isn’t a penalty. However the authors conclude it still presents an issue for women who run for office because they are less likely to be married with families etc. Harris is an active case study in how women who do not have biological children are attacked on the campaign trail.

The political utility of a family helps explain why someone consulting Anderson told him to pose with a faux fam, I guess. One study (that is now a decade old) looked at campaign advertisements and found male candidates are more likely to feature their families in campaign materials than female candidates. This observation is likely due to the efforts by female candidates to convey to voters that they are not solely wives and mothers but also capable of other duties, whereas men are not held back by the association with their family life. Interestingly, despite deliberately downplaying their families, some studies have found media coverage tends to focus on female candidates’ families more so than male candidates’ families. Even if media coverage that focuses on a woman’s family and her role as a mother is not judgmental, it can be problematic because it arguably displaces coverage that might otherwise be focused on issues, which would more clearly establish her as a viable, experienced, political candidate. 

All told, the way family and parenting are framed in political campaigns reveals significant gendered dynamics that can work against women. While family can be politically beneficial, it often ties female candidates to traditional caregiving roles, limiting their political viability and increasing scrutiny. Single Republican male candidates, like Derrick Anderson, may be at a disadvantage because they are single, but it feels like that trap is one of their party’s own making. Overall, these patterns reflect the persistent impact of gender norms, creating a political environment where personal lives, especially for women, are disproportionately scrutinized and weaponized.

As always, here’s more for your reading list:

1. The Baffler. Andrea Grimes. “Rank and Vile.” (September 10, 2024).

Ever read something and wish you wrote it? Grimes really nails so much of the GOP’s modern misogyny and how it’s playing out in 2024, especially with JD Vance on the presidential ticket. Plus, she says “chucklefucks” which is a top-tier insult.

There’s no need to hold either Trump or Vance up beside “Coach” Walz, the neighborly former national guardsman and champion of free lunches, to see the Republican ticket’s odious masculinity for what it is: less about being “manly” and more about spewing bare misogyny.

And this is also clarifying:

Incels hate women, of course, but they hate another group even more: men who don’t hate women.

Similar, they hate men who aren’t afraid to be associated with women, or feminine things. That reality is why I find myself fist pumping when men on social media are even the tiniest bit vulnerable and the comments are flooded with “go off emotionally mature king” or what have you.

2. Good politics/Bad politics substack. David S. Bernstein. “Minding the gender gap.” (September 12, 2024).

Got to chat with David about gender, and also gaps, in the presidential race. Covers a lot of ground, and will get you thinking.

3. The Atlantic. Adam Serwer. “The real ‘DEI candidates.’” (September 14, 2024).

Now, it would be simpler for conservatives who claimed Harris was an imbecile to admit that maybe the current vice president and former senator, attorney general, and district attorney is just smarter than they were giving her credit for. But that would require abandoning the assumptions about Black people and women that drove them to make their initial assessment. They cannot do that, because doing so would illustrate why diversity efforts are necessary in the first place: that plainly competent people are often wrongly assumed to be stupid because they are not white men, and denied opportunities as a result.

4. The Guardian. Moira Donegan. “Republicans think Harris can’t be president because she hasn’t had children.” (September 24, 2024).

Donegan nails it:

The far-right drift of young men, after all, seems largely to stem from anxiety over their perceived loss of gendered status: their fear and anger that men are no longer uncontested in their social dominance, and that women are no longer uniformly compelled to serve them. What could be more comforting to young men descending into this kind of bigoted woundedness than the confident declaration that women who do not organize their lives around traditional roles are worthless? And what could be more threatening to them than the notion that a woman might ascend to that superlative position of patriarchal power – the presidency?