Who Cares? Canadian Attitudes About Women In Politics

Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2008

ABSTRACT

Annual Meeting of the …, 2006

have argued that a process of gender realignment is pushing men to the right and women to the left. This paper uses data from the 2006 Canadian election study to assess their argument that the "modern gender gap" is rooted in cultural differences between women and men rather than in structural and situational differences. While there is some evidence that public sector employment and higher education help to explain why women are more likely than men to vote for the NDP, their impact is offset by religiosity. Women tend to be more religious than men and this helps to explain why many women remain attracted to the Conservatives. The most important factors in explaining why men are more likely than women to vote for the right-wing party and women are more likely than men to vote for the left-wing party are clearly cultural. Women are more skeptical than men of market-based arguments, less ready to embrace closer ties with the US, and more liberal when it comes to social mores and alternative lifestyles. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of gendered patterns of voting for electoral politics in Canada.

2018

With women holding 27.2 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons, Canada ranks sixtyfourth among 193 countries in the world in terms of women’s legislative representation as recorded by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Twenty years ago, when I first began to compare Canada’s position to that of other countries, we ranked closer to twentieth (1997), and just over five years ago we ranked forty-fourth. This is a long way to drop in a relatively short period of time, especially for a country that prides itself on how far we have come in other areas of gender equality. If the focus was more specifically on where New Brunswick would place, the situation would be even more depressing. With women only holding 16.3 per cent of the seats in the New Brunswick legislative assembly after the 2014 provincial election, the province, if it were an independent nation, would rank 123rd in the world.

Atlantis Critical Studies in Gender Culture Social Justice, 2003

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ideological diversity among feminist women in electoral politics in Canada. It shows that feminist political women form a diversified group: some are liberal but others are conservative. Certain feminists even support positions against what are known as traditional demands of the second-wave feminism. RESUME Cet article se propose d'explorer la diversite ideologique parmi les femmes feministes elues en politique au Canada. II montre que les femmes politiques feministes constituent ungroupe diversifie : certaines sont liberates alors que d'autres sont conservatrices. Quelquesunes soutiennent meme des positions contraires aux revendications traditionnellement associees a la deuxieme vague du feminisme.

Canadian Journal of Political Science

In this research note, we document the extent to which negative beliefs about women's capacity to hold public office are widespread in Canada. Using a list experiment, our results demonstrate that many Canadians believe that men are “naturally better” leaders than are women and that women are “too emotional” and “too nice” for politics. While some groups are willing to explicitly own these views when asked directly about them (for example, older people, men, those who are more conservative and religious), others are unwilling to do so unless social desirability is mitigated (for example, younger people, left-leaning). By overcoming concerns with social desirability, we show that women still face explicit, often sexist, barriers in political work.

Canadian Journal of Political Science

Research in political behaviour has for some time pointed to the existence of a ‘gender gap,’ between the political attitudes of men and women. Men and women diverge in their attitudes on many political issues, including foreign policy, social welfare spending, and crime and punishment. With this focus on the differences between women and men in political survey research, it is important to better understand the underlying assumption: that women and men form two distinct groups which can be isolated and analyzed. Furthermore, this research assumes that the biological difference of sex is synonymous with the socially constructed concept of gender. Especially in quantitative analysis, the two concepts are used interchangeably, and scholars do not carefully consider the important distinctions between sex and gender. Gender research asserts that in fact, gender is not dichotomous, but more closely reflects “a continuum of norms and behaviours socially constructed, socially perpetuated, and socially alterable” (Mackie, 2). Understanding gender as distinct from sex, and assessing attitudes and values accordingly may provide new insight into the ‘gender gap.’ Using data gathered during six provincial elections in Canada, we compare the traditional variable of ‘sex’ with a new variable that measures gender as a continuum, in hopes of better understanding the gender gap in political attitudes.

Topic: Using examples from the course, discuss the relationship of representation, citizenship and identity in Canada. In your answer, address the different meanings or aspects of representation discussed in class (voice/image) and the ways in which the intersectionality of gender, race, class and sexuality impacts the quality and quantity of representation we achieve.

Canadian Political Science Review, 2015

Recent elections have resulted in women holding over one quarter of provincial legislative seats, with women in urban and Western Canada seeing greater success. A much smaller proportion of seats are held by lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) politicians, although they are found in similar regions. This article identifies factors such as stronger parties of the left, less traditional social and economic structures, and a greater attention to diversity in more populous urban centers as attributing to these results for both female and LGB candidates.

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2018

We study data on the gender of more than 21,000 unique candidates in all Canadian federal elections since 1921, when the first women ran for seats in Parliament. This large data set allows us to compute precise estimates of the difference in the electoral fortunes of men and women candidates. When accounting for party effects and time trends, we find that the difference between the vote shares of men and women is substantively negligible (±0.5 percentage point). This gender gap was larger in the 1920s (±2.5 percentage points), but it is now statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our results have important normative implications: political parties should recruit and promote more women candidates because they remain underrepresented in Canadian politics and because they do not suffer from a substantial electoral penalty.

Political Research Quarterly, 1998

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Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2003

Stalled: The representation of women in Canadian governments. Edited Trimble, Arscott, Tremblay, 2013

In 2009, Nova Scotia elected the first NDP government east of Ontario. The rise of a woman-friendly leftist party had a decisive impact. The proportion of women elected finally caught up to the national average. In-person interviews with MLAs enrich the analysis.