Commemorating Women's History Month

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate the opportunity to come here to speak about women's History Month and thank the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia for providing all of us with this opportunity this evening.

They do not call it "history" for nothing. In general, the history of our Nation and our world has been about "his" story, about men's story. And it is not surprising, as men have written history books and have been considered the leaders that books are written about.

And this is not meant in any way as an anti-male statement, just a fact that most of history is about the leadership of men in our world.

I wanted to just share tonight a study that was done very recently by the Center for the American Woman and Politics, about why it is that more women do not run for political office. The premise is that study after study has shown that when women run, women win in the same numbers that men do.

And, yet, if you look at this wonderful body, our august House of Representatives, we are about 14 percent women. And the same is true of the United States Senate. And so the question really is why do we not appear in greater numbers and why do more women not run since they have equal opportunity to win?

So they did this study and what they did is they created what they called an eligibility pool, 1,000 men and 1,000 women who were from the fields that produced most candidates, business, education, and law. And by definition, the thousand women and thousand men were equally qualified. These were people who were at mid- or upper-career level. They asked them a number of questions to determine the differences between them.

One of the differences that was really disturbing and chilling to me was that when asked about their own qualifications, the women in the study were twice as likely as the men to say about themselves that they were not qualified to run for office. Now, as I said, by definition these men and women were equally qualified.

And perhaps even more disturbing, that sense of being not qualified in twice the numbers as men ran across generations. The younger women were as likely to declare themselves not qualified as older women.

So clearly we have a challenge before us. What do we do to these qualified women to make them feel that they are not so?

But there was a hopeful part of that study. What it said was that the one factor that was in some ways the most responsible for someone making the decision to run for office was being asked to run for office, someone making the suggestion. And they divided those who make the suggestion into formal actors and informal actors. So, in other words, if someone is asked by a formal actor, that being an elected official, a party official or a political activist, to run for office, they are likely to think of themselves as candidates or potential candidates.

So to me that said, as a woman who is interested in getting more women involved in leadership positions, what we need to do is to encourage women, encourage young women and women older than that to run for office, to put that seed in their head and create really an old girl's network, if you will, that will bring women along to think of themselves as candidates.

We also need to, in this 21st century, explore what are those situations, what is the socialization process that ends up with women not feeling as qualified to run for office. These were women who rated the activities involved in being a candidate as being something they were even more willing to do than men; and yet when it came to that final question, do you see yourself as qualified to run for office, twice as many women as men in this pool said they were not qualified.

So this is a challenge to us, to men and women alike. If we want to have the kind of diversity, if we want to have the benefit of women's leadership, then we are going to have to build in the systems that do that and the support networks that will encourage women so that we have the kind of equality as we move forward in this century.

So I wanted to share the outcome of this wonderful study. It is the Center for the American Woman and Politics. They are at Rutgers University. They are part of the Eagleton Institute, and over the years they have provided us with very useful information in moving forward to include more women in our political universe.

So I thank my colleague from the District of Columbia for focusing on this important issue and for allowing me to participate tonight.

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