Understanding the Developmental Roots of Gender Gaps in Politics

Abstract

Globally, women are underrepresented in politics. We propose developmental psychology offers an important, yet underused, theoretical lens for understanding and counteracting the gender gap in political leadership. In making this proposal, we harness insight from research on women’s underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), where developmental psychology has revealed that cultural beliefs and attitudes about STEM are transmitted early in life and begin undermining girls’ interest and confidence in STEM long before adulthood. Leveraging developmental research from STEM as inspiration, we identify five areas of inquiry that are critical to a developmentally informed perspective on the origins of the gender gap in politics. Although studying children to understand political inequities among adults may be playing the “long game,” we argue this will be a necessary step to advance gender equity in political leadership.

Keywords:

• Developmental psychology
• gender
• political leadership
• politics
• STEM

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the members of the Cognitive Development Lab at New York University and Alex Shaw for feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, we use the words “women” and “men” and “girls” and “boys,” as they have been used in the majority of the literature reviewed. Although these terms imply discrete categories, future considerations of the gender gap in politics will benefit from conceptualizing individuals’ gender identities and gender expressions on continuums.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this manuscript was supported in part by a grant from the Cornell University Center for the Study of Inequality awarded to Kinzler and by grant BCS-1733897 from the US National Science Foundation, awarded to Cimpian.