Although they make up 51 percent of the U.S. population, women occupy only about one-third of all elected positions in the United States. According to Representative Rashida Tlaib, that disparity is owed mainly to one malicious factor: threats of violence.
“My colleagues and I in Congress have experienced threats, violence, and discrimination for simply existing here,” Tlaib said recently. “This is unacceptable.” A credulous write-up of her claim and the data that purportedly support it in Yahoo! News maintains that this menace justifies the efforts by Tlaib and her fellow “Squad” members — Representatives Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ayanna Pressley — for “government action to ease violence against women in politics.”
Yahoo’s dispatch doesn’t go into how American legislators could strengthen laws that already criminalize violence and threats of violence. Tlaib’s office is promoting a congressional resolution recognizing that “violence against women in politics is a form of gender-based violence” and urges the federal government to “adopt policies that promote women’s political participation and mitigate violence against women in politics, in person and online.” It is, however, unclear what proponents of this legislation believe the practical effect of this statement of principles would be.
It might come as no surprise that Tlaib has vastly oversimplified a complex matter of human psychology in the (successful) pursuit of a positive news cycle for herself. In a deeper exploration of the subject matter that Tlaib mangled, politics professors Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox studied for the Brookings Institution what they call the “Ambition Gap” between men and women.
That gap has remained generally unchanged over the three decades in which the Citizen Political Ambition Study has examined the disparate ambitions of the sexes despite the dynamism of the American political environment. “The roots of the ‘Ambition Gap’ are deeply embedded,” they write:
Consider how women and men with the same qualifications and credentials evaluate themselves. Whereas 36% of the men we surveyed consider themselves “very qualified” to run for office, only 20% of women feel that way. By contrast, women are three times as likely as men (24% compared to 8%) to rate themselves as “not at all qualified” to run. These gender differences have not narrowed since 2001 or 2011.
Men are vastly more likely to report having been encouraged to run for office, and men are more likely to admit that they have “seriously considered” a candidacy. Whether they haven’t received such encouragement or simply decline to reveal that to pollsters, women are far less likely to say the same. And yet, even though these figures haven’t changed much over the decades, the “number of women serving in Congress has doubled.”
We can extrapolate a lot from these data about the efficacy of public-relations campaigns aimed at convincing women to run for office, the disparate psychological profiles associated with men and women, and even Americans’ preconceptions about female candidates for higher office. What these data do not suggest or even imply is that a widespread campaign of harassment has convinced American women to relegate themselves to society’s shadows.
Tlaib would likely be among the first to agree that society should take threats of violence and the harassment of women seriously. To judge from this flippant effort to leverage that social malady only to promote her own political brand, Tlaib does not.