Parity in Politics - Why Women Don't Want It

Marking the 20-year anniversary of the Year of the Woman, Karen Tumulty's front-page Washington Post article details the never-ending challenges of gender parity in American politics. While an informative piece about the United States' 78th world ranking in woman's representation in national legislatures, tied with Turkmenistan for those keeping track, it reflects a flawed conventional wisdom about why more women don't run for and win elected office.

In discussing why more women are not politically engaged, many well-know facts were listed:

• Women often wait until later in their careers and lives to run for office making it a challenge to rise through the ranks to high office

• Many women wait to be asked to run, instead of initiating a political campaign, often questioning their credentials and qualifications more so than their male-counterparts

• Often women feel that the electorate is biased against women candidates, with high-profile examples of Clinton, Palin, Pelosi and Bachman as media and partisan targets fresh in their minds

The answer to these challenges as espoused by numerous women's groups is to train more women to run for office. From political "boot camps" like Rutgers Center for American Women in Politics Ready to Run program to the newly minted 50-50 in 2020 women's groups throughout the country believe that if more women are trained to run for office they will.

The problem with this strategy is that it doesn't work-just look at the last 20 years the article details as proof.

In 1992, I was a young political consultant determined to bring parity to politics having grounded my early political life working for a rising star of women leaders, Debbie Stabenow, now one of just 17 females Senators. During that election cycle and for many to come, I flew around the country training women, helping with their campaigns and hopeful that the efforts of so many women who tirelessly gave of themselves, and for a lot less money than our male counterparts, would bring us closer to parity.

Eight years later and hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles behind me, I examined the challenge of woman in politics as I created a leadership course at the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University. The reason why women didn't run were clearly researched then and not significantly different that the facts presented today. The answer two decades ago was to prepare women to run for office and 20 years later it has had little impact. Why?

The truth is that preparing women for the battle of politics is not the answer. Woman are not running for office because they are choosing to spend their time and energy in ways other than engaging in the senseless, and all too often futile, act of policy making in contemporary politics. No amount of preparation is going to change the pragmatic nature of women who will choose to focus their energy and attention on real world solutions, rather than engage in politics that rarely creates meaningful change and when it does at a very high personal cost to one's quality of life.