This month, we feature some fantastic work from the annual APSA conference (and some work beyond the conference). We are highlighting some of the gender scholars on the job market whom we know of - apologies if we missed you, but we can update the blog so email us if we did!
If you have an article you’d like us to feature in the next newsletter, please reach out at bhumi.purohit@gmail.com.
Select Job Market Candidates, with presented papers and abstracts
American Politics
Sydney Carr, “The Right To Bare Arms: News Media, Public Opinion, and Black Women in Politics”: Political science scholars have long posited that Black Americans and women face penalties in terms of how they are evaluated by the American public. Some researchers emphasize intersectionality, and have advanced the idea that Black female political figures are doubly disadvantaged due to their dual race-gender identity. This dissertation accordingly examines whether Black female political elites do indeed face a unique combination of disadvantages in the American political arena. I develop hypotheses based on previous studies that have examined the experiences of Black women in the political arena and beyond, particularly work suggesting the importance of intersectionality for understanding the combined effects of race and gender. And I examine both political attitudes and news coverage to identify the ways in which Americans’ beliefs about Black female political figures are (or are not) distinctive relative to White women, White men, and Black men. Further, this study offers a multi-methodological approach utilizing survey and experimental data in addition to automated content analyses of media data to shed light on the experiences of Black women in the political arena.
Annabelle Hutchinson, “When Men Lose Power: Gender, Work, and Race in American Politics”: What happens when those who have long held power feel as though their economic, social, and political status is threatened? This paper investigates the loss of economic power and status of a group that has long held the reins of power in their society - white non-Hispanic men in America. In the context of the United States - where the gender gap in earnings has declined, more women than men are attending college, and more prime-age men are leaving the workforce altogether - this paper provides evidence that white non-Hispanic American men (but not women nor non-white groups) view job loss as a threat to their masculinity and power and respond to this threat by expressing more sexist attitudes, more support for traditional gender norms, and significantly less support for female political candidates. These findings are supported by an original panel survey that re-interviewed the same respondents over a sixteen month period between April 2020 and June 2021, a time period where millions of Americans lost, changed, or left their jobs. The results show that, when facing a job loss and a threat to their economic status, white non-Hispanic men in America will respond with a sexist backlash in an effort to reclaim their status.
Sara Morell, “Developing the Pipeline: How Women’s Organizations Support Women Candidates”: Why is there considerable state-level variation in where women run and win? In this article, I argue that the relationship between candidate recruitment and the decision to run is dependent on how the person being asked to run perceives the recruitment efforts. Specifically, I demonstrate that women's candidate training organizations (WCTOs) increase women's political ambition because of their ability to provide credible and substantive asks. Using interviews with 57 organizations that train candidates to run for political office, I provide evidence that WCTOs are more likely to engage in active recruitment and mobilization, more likely to put substantial resources behind their candidates and more likely to address specific gender barriers to running, than non-gender candidate training organizations (NGCTOs). However, I also find that women's organizations are less likely to talk about barriers faced by non-white and non-straight candidates, influencing who benefits from their support. Then, using an original online survey experiment, with 1,200 white, Black and Latina women, I demonstrate that the strategies used by women's organizations to recruit and train candidates increase women's ambition. Specifically, when women are mobilized to think about changes that can benefit their local community and when they learn about support they can receive from women-specific organizations, they are more likely to want to run for political office. Overall, my work highlights the transformative and growing role of WCTOs on decreasing the gender gap in women's political representation, by showing that candidate recruitment is highly conditional on the nature of the ask itself.
Rachel Smilan-Goldstein, ““The Most Horrible Psycho-Sexual Fears”: Testing the Jesse Jackson Hypothesis”: Prior research on White racial attitudes and political psychology has centered gendered and sexualized stories of racism, but has not accounted for how these narratives around race invoke gendered attitudes. One often discussed example of a political ad that motivated racial prejudice is the “Willie Horton” ad aired on behalf of the George H.W. Bush campaign in 1988. The ad describes the rape of a White woman by a Black man, and the same Black man’s physical domination and symbolic emasculation of a White man. As Jesse Jackson stated shortly after the ad was released, the Horton story “is designed to create the most horrible psycho-sexual fears” (emphasis added). Past scholarship has not empirically examined the gendered, sexualized nature of the racism that Jackson describes. An original survey experiment shows that narratives like the Horton story—compared to those that invoke race but not gender—mobilize both benevolent sexism and racial resentment in individuals’ candidate evaluations and crime policy attitudes. Narratives of racialized sexual violence, and to a lesser extent racialized non-sexual crime, activate psycho-sexual fears, as measured by women’s fear of rape. A reevaluation of 1988 ANES data confirms that Jackson’s hypothesis more fully explains the impacts of the Horton ad than a race-only explanation.
Comparative Politics
Brenna Armstrong, “Oversight, Gender, and Politician Strategies”: Do men and women conduct oversight at equal rates? Men and women elected to office are tasked with three priorities: lawmaking, constituency services, and oversight. While often overlooked in research, oversight is an important democratic principle that ensures accountable governance, and given the unique position of women in government, men and women are likely to prioritize oversight and lawmaking differently. I develop a theory of risk aversion and strategic allocation, in which I hypothesize that women are more oversight-driven and are also more likely to conduct oversight in women’s issue areas. Differences in oversight behavior may be one mechanism for women’s presence in government reducing corruption perceptions. To test these hypotheses, I use oversight committee data from the Colombian Congress (2006-2018). I find that women are more likely to conduct oversight in high visibility committees and when the issue is stereotypically feminine.
Anirvan Chowdhury, “Religiously Conservative Parties and Women’s Political Mobilization”: Over the last two decades, India’s polity has seen a remarkable increase in women’s political participation. Between 2009 and 2014, 27% more women attended election rallies, party meetings and canvassed on behalf of political parties. But paradoxically, this growth was most pronounced for women who voted for the right-wing religiously conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) whose ideology of Hindutva assigns women to traditional gender norms within the household. What then explains the BJP’s success at engaging women in public spaces? I argue that in patriarchal settings where women’s public partisan engagement can be viewed as transgressive—and therefore costly—men act as gatekeepers to women’s participation. However, religiously conservative parties, perhaps counter-intuitively, may be able to reduce these costs. Drawing on extensive qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, along with experiments conducted with women and their domestic gatekeepers, I show that the BJP’s ability to mobilize women stems from framing its politics as seva, a religious and cultural norm of selfless service. Crucially seva overlaps women's domestic caregiving roles as mothers and dutiful wives, extending the private sphere to the public. Furthermore, because of this reinforcement of women’s traditional roles, political seva does not challenge men’s authority within the family, or patriarchal structures of power at large. Consequently, men unblock women’s participation when it is articulated in terms of seva.
Rithika Kumar, “Left Behind or Left Ahead? Implications of Male Migration on Female Political Engagement in India”: How does internal male migration, which impacts millions of households across the Global South, shape political engagement among women in sending communities? I examine this understudied issue in India, home to over 100 million internal migrants. I blend qualitative evidence with an analysis of a nationally representative panel of 24,000 female respondents, to identify the impact of migration on female political engagement within a difference-in-difference framework. I highlight the temporary male absence created by internal migration in countries like India, which is often circular in nature. Short-term absences do not lead to deep structural transformations in migrant households around employment and access to financial resources, but can still afford meaningful opportunities for improved political engagement. I present three sets of results consistent with such a nuanced impact. First, I show migration improves the political knowledge and engagement of women in sending households. Second, these improvements happen alongside complementary changes in women’s social and economic position, including their mobility, access to household financial resources, decision-making power, and social status when husbands are away. Finally, I demonstrate that while some of these effects may persist once husbands return, several others dissipate. These findings illustrate the important but constrained impact of internal migration on female political engagement.
Franziska Roscher, “The Gender Turnout Gap Revisited: When Do Women Participate (Un)Equally in the Electoral Process?”: When do women participate equally in the electoral process? Using India as an in-depth case study, I argue that traditional theories of female turnout, focused on individual resource endowments, economic development and female labor force participation, can explain very little of the variation in the gender gap in turnout that we observe empirically because they all conceptualize turnout as an individual-level decision. Instead, I propose a framework of women's turnout that takes the household into account, and show how under the right conditions—high returns to a vote and high intra-household coordination on vote choice—female turnout may rise even in the absence of women's agency, resource endowments or overall development. Building on the literatures on vote buying, turnout buying and ethnic parties, I develop a theory on when and why parties should be most likely to entice households to provide support for female turnout. When party competition is structured along a single ethnic dimension in a clientelist setting, vote buying (or “persuasion”) is severely constrained. Where parties cannot “go broad,” they will necessarily have to “go deep” by mobilizing all co-ethnics to turn out. The ensuing increases in female turnout, however, are not a sign of boosts in women's empowerment, but rather a function of surges in men's strategic support for a type of female participation they stand to benefit from. My work thus outlines the conditions under which women's political participation may predate economic participation.
International Relations / International Political Economy
Tara Chandra, “Untangling Dynamics in Civil Conflict: Insurgent Behavior towards Civilians”: What explains variation in insurgent targeting of women within a conflict? In this paper, I examine the puzzle of inconsistency in insurgent targeting of women during rebel operations. Specifically, I argue that gender-based targeting is costly to rebels, and present a theory of targeting of women that argues that the dynamics between insurgents and counter-insurgents can create strategic incentives for insurgents to begin targeting women as part of a signaling mechanism. I marry a rationalist approach with a feminist approach, arguing that insurgents target women to prevent civilians from sharing information with counter-insurgents, to shame and humiliate the counter-insurgent, to control local norms, and to create bargaining leverage in the event that the conflict ends in a negotiated settlement. I leverage variation in Boko Haram's targeting of women and girls over the past several years to illustrate the theory presented in the paper.
Soohyun Cho, “Protectionism Reconsidered: Economic Insecurity, Gender, and Social Identity”: Previous research has revealed a gender gap in trade attitudes as well as in the rise of populism and economic nationalism. Nonetheless, existing studies have paid less attention to two notable tendencies in trade attitudes: (1) Despite their more populist attitudes, men continue to be more supportive of free trade than women; and (2) Women continue to support protectionism despite their lack of populist attitudes. Accordingly, the gender gap in trade attitudes has not closed despite the rise of populism, which has taken place particularly among men. Why are women consistently more protectionist than men, and when does men's populism turn into protectionism? When will the gender gap in trade attitudes be closed? Despite the puzzling dynamics of the gender gap in trade attitudes, no consensus has emerged on how women and men form their trade attitudes. This paper investigates the causal process of preference formation across women and men using a decomposition analysis, a survey experiment, a mediation analysis, and structural topic models. I argue that economic insecurity causes both women and men to form protectionist attitudes. I particularly claim that the causal process of forming trade preferences is consistent for both women and men, but the roots of economic insecurity differ across genders. On the one hand, persistent and systematic gender discrimination causes women to perceive negative effects of trade on their gender group, which in turn results in protectionist attitudes. On the other hand, stochastic trade shocks cause men to support protectionism when they perceive negative effects of trade on their country, activating their populism.