Where does the pipeline get leaky? The progressive ambition of school board members and personal and political network recruitment

ABSTRACT

Public school boards are a significant exception to the significant gender gap in political representation. Throughout the country, 44 percent of board members are women; this is a potentially significant female candidate pool for higher office, given that, for example, of the state legislators who held prior elective office, 26 percent of them had served on a school board. With such a collection of experienced candidates, why then, are so few women progressing to higher levels of office? Drawing on findings of a survey of a representative sample of more than 300 elected school board members in the state of Pennsylvania, I extend the limited research on the role of networks of recruitment’s impact on the progressive ambition among elected school board members and discusses the factors in both personal and political network recruitment associated with gender differences. I also highlight the largest delta between men and women: interest in running for state legislature. Implications for the deficient pipeline of women to higher office and potential remedies are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Political ambition
• candidate recruitment
• progressive ambition
• personal networks
• women’s representation
• school boards

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the insights and advice from the Gender and Political Psychology Writing Group. In particular the significant and important contributions from Rosalyn Cooperman Korff, Mirya Holman, and Erin Cassese on early drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Compared to only 15% of male legislators.

2 Pennsylvania has 35% representation of women on school boards

3 Moncrief, Squire, and Jewell (2001) note that at lower levels of office holding, both men and women are “amateur politicians” (24).

4 Many school districts did not make publicly available individual contact information for their school board, but rather a single district mailing address with no guarantee that board members would receive a targeted mailing.

5 Lawless and Fox (2010) describe their pool as being majority male (54%) and disproportionately Democratic (60%) and white (84%). More than three-fourths (78%) reported having a graduate degree, in large part, because the sample purposefully included attorneys. Forty percent indicated their household income was $200,000 or more. The mean age was 54 years. There were statistically significant differences between men and women by party affiliation and age; women were more likely to be Democrats and were an average of three years younger. Women were also more likely to earn in the bottom response category (less than $50,000) and less likely to be in the highest category (more than $200,000).

6 Pennsylvania uses the term school board “director” for members of each board.

7 While the dependent variable in this case, progressive ambition, is ordinal, I treat it as continuous since – as a psychological concept – individuals may be anywhere along complex decision-making spectrum from “would never consider” to “definitely running”, so estimating a specific response category along that continuum is not particularly insightful to understanding whether an individual is likely to run. Obviously, a continuous variable for progressive ambition would be difficult to measure on a survey, so the standard (and validated) measures (such as those employed in this study) are limiting in this way. Given that the coefficients in linear are more easily interpretable and estimating a specific category of the DV not terribly useful in the case of progressive ambition, I preferred linear regression in this instance.

8 While there may not have been statistically significant gender differences in interest in running for these other various offices, there are some consistencies in the role the two types of recruitment play. Personal network recruitment has a positive effect on ambition for virtually every level of office, though it is only statistically significant at the higher levels of and judicial offices (e.g. House of Representatives, district attorney). Though within-gender sample variance limited the ability to do split analyses on every office, the positive effect of personal network encouragement was more pronounced for women for the office of mayor (p < .04; OR = 1.505) and was not significant for men (p < .491; OR = 1.075) – a similar pattern to that found in the state legislative ambition. Political networks seemed to have a more depressive effect, though only in the case of interest in running for city, town, or county council was there statistical significance and here, consistent with other findings, this effect appears to be driven by men in the sample who are encouraged by these political networks to be interested in this office (p < .006; OR = 1.420).

9 This statistic was provided by the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics. As of this writing, the statistics were not yet available anywhere publicly, but were calculated based on original data collection done by the Center.

10 Political parties are relatively strong in Pennsylvania, which could help account for the strength of this finding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics.