Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.
I don't want to repeat many of the things that I think my co-panellists and others who are testifying might be inclined to say. Instead, I want to address what I think is the real root problem of all of these barriers, and that's sexism. I realize that's not a surprise to anybody, but we have some interesting work that looks at both explicit and implicit sexism. They're very different and they have different effects, so I want to make you aware of what we're finding.
The ultimate conclusion I draw is that overcoming women's implicit internalized bias against themselves acting in politics isn't going to do very much for women in politics in general if the far greater problem of explicit sexism in politics is not addressed as well.
When I say “sexism” in this context, I mean two things: it's a combination of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, coupled with a lack of power. Women in Canada are on average in about 26% of all elected positions across all levels of government. In things like local politics, it's not more friendly towards women in Canada. This combination of prejudice, stereotyping, and bias, plus this disempowerment, is powerful in a number of ways.
People who hold explicitly sexist views will tell us that they think men are naturally better leaders than women. They will tell us that women are too emotional for politics, or that women are too nice for the rough and tumble of politics. This attitude clearly relies on stereotypes and is only looking at gender as a reason to rule women out from political leadership.
We have work that shows that approximately 20%—or one in five—of Canadians hold these views. Men are more likely to endorse these views than are women. Older people are more likely to endorse these views than younger people. Most importantly, it cuts across all levels of education, so post-secondary education doesn't fix it. It's also present at the same levels in every single political party.
One point I want to make is that every single political party in Canada, by our data, has 20% of its members holding explicitly sexist views. This is going to have a real material effect on recruitment for candidates.
When we look at other forms of explicit sexism, we see they are focusing more on stereotypes about women, mothering, and work. These are people who reject the idea that women can work outside the home if they have children or can form a good bond with their children if they work. Again, men hold these views more than women do.
The implicit bias is very different. The implicit bias is unconscious. People don't say this out loud. What we're finding is that the implicit bias is a hesitation when people associate women or more feminine names with political power or political jobs. It's more unconscious in this context. The surprising thing is that we find implicit bias towards women in politics—against women in politics—amongst women only. Men don't exhibit it. Only women do.
For me, this is really profound. It says to me that a lot of women have internalized this explicit sexism they're seeing in the political system, and that in turn is driving down their political interest and their confidence in their ability to be a political actor and driving down their political ambition.
One of the things we find for women who don't have this internalized bias is that they are more interested and more confident, and they have ambition. Women who have the bias are not.
Explicit sexism has more material consequences, though. The implicit stuff drives down things that are going down with individual women, but explicit sexists are really critical of women candidates. In one study, we asked people to evaluate hypothetical candidates. We had four candidates, four profiles, and identical credentials in all of them. We just changed the names from Steven to Rebecca, and from Robert to Amy. When we changed those names and left all those credentials the same, people who held explicitly sexist views rated women significantly lower in terms of their competence or their perceived intelligence, their perceived likeability, and their perceived warmth.
This tells me a number of things about people who hold explicitly sexist views. They're not going to recruit women as candidates, or they're going to be a lot less likely to do it. They're less likely to mentor women, they're not going to support women as party leaders, and they may not even vote for women as candidates. Worse, though, they can see a woman who has the same credentials as a man and still think that she's less appropriate for a political job precisely because of this explicit sexism that they hold.
I also think that this explicit sexism plays into the idea that women's levels of under-representation aren't important as a political problem that we ought to be addressing.
There are some people who will say that it's just normal and natural for men to be overrepresented in politics and for women to be under-represented. It's these explicitly sexist things that in my view feed into that implicit internalized bias that we're also seeing in some Canadian women.
I see this show up in nomination contests. I had an earlier paper with my colleague Marc-André Bodet at the University of Laval. We looked at nomination contests between 2004 and 2011, and we found that nearly every single political party nominated a supermajority of women in districts that were unwinnable, but a majority of men either in districts that were competitive, where the campaign mattered, or they were in safe seats for their party. This pattern held for open seats, so we can't say that this is a problem with incumbency, and worse, it held for women incumbents, which means that women who already held seats in the House of Commons were more precariously placed than were their male peers.
I think parties and leaders need to acknowledge this pattern, and they need to acknowledge that all of them have explicit sexists in their ranks. What this means for parties and for organizers is that they actually should start saying no to candidates who volunteer or who are easy recruits from overrepresented groups. It means that leaders need to tell their organizers to find a set number of women to run. That number for parity in Canada is 169, so it's a low bar. If this sounds like a quota, I would simply point out that I would just call it the leader's prerogative. We all know Canadian party leaders get from their parties what they ask for. Every party leader has at some point asked for this and has received it, so don't call it a quota. Call it leader's prerogative, and just get the job done.
One thing I would be happy to speak about in questions is how this explicit sexism plays into online threats towards women. I agree with my colleagues that women need role models and that we could deal with this implicit sexism if we simply had more women who were elected into public office. All of the evidence shows that quotas bring in more meritorious women and displace mediocre men, so people concerned with merit shouldn't be that worried about a quota, and that you actually need to get close to a gender-equal parliament for those role-model effects to take place.
Thank you very much.