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POLITICS, FEMINISM AND THE
REFORMATION OF GENDER
Why do men always dominate political elites? If women want to change

the world, are they going about it in the right way?
Caught between their female gender and their aspirations in a public
sphere founded on the gender role of men, women face a problem that is
more intractable than either conventional or feminist political analysis has
fully recognised. In this book, Jenny Chapman addresses both the
substance of the problem and feminist strategies for change.
Part 1 focuses on a key aspect of the male political world. Male
dominance of political elites is virtually universal and yet there is no general
theory of recruitment to account for this; there is even a serious lack of real
recruitment studies in the academic literature. Drawing on feminist and
mainstream theory, Jenny Chapman uses a rigorous comparative study of
political recruitment to show why different models of recruitment among
men produce virtually identical gender results, irrespective of context. The
emphasis is on men’s recruitment patterns and the data come from
countries as varied as the USA, the USSR and Scotland (where extensive
new survey and interview data has been collected for the purpose); self-
selection is analysed as well as the role of political parties and other
institutions.
Part 2 looks beyond this universal pattern to its gender basis and
strategies for change. The rise of feminism as a social movement poses
problems of organisational and gender strategy which different strands of
feminism have tried to resolve in very different ways. Jenny Chapman’s
review of feminist strategies ranges from early communitarian socialism to
Nordic feminism today, with historical case-studies of Finland and
revolutionary Russia and studies of contemporary Norway, Iceland and the
German Greens. A critical review of women’s gender theories and their
policy implications provides the touchstone for identifying a convincing
feminist strategy.
Jenny Chapman is a lecturer in Politics at the University of Strathclyde.
POLITICS, FEMINISM
AND THE
REFORMATION OF
GENDER
Jenny Chapman
London & New York

First published 1993
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1993 Jennifer P. Chapman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 0-203-34448-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-01698-3 (Print Edition)

CONTENTS
List of figures and tables vi

Preface and acknowledgments viii
Introduction x
Part 1
1 GENDER AND RECRUITMENT: THE NATURE OF 2
THE PROBLEM
2 MAJOR PARTIES AND RECRUITMENT: THE USA, 27
SCOTLAND AND THE USSR
3 CHANGING THE SELECTORS: NON-PARTISAN 70
RECRUITMENT
4 MINOR PARTIES AND THE GENDER PATTERN 106
Part 2
5 THE RISE OF FEMINISM AND THE PARAMETERS 126
OF CHANGE
6 EQUAL RIGHTS AND SOCIALIST FEMINISM 133
7 FEMINISM IN PRACTICE: NATIONALIST FINLAND 156
AND REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
8 GENDER THEORY AND FEMINIST STRATEGY 188
9 WEST GERMAN GREENS, NORWEGIAN 224
FEMINISTS AND THE ICELANDIC
KWENNALISTINN
10 CONCLUSION 260
Notes 263
v
Bibliography 297
Index 306
FIGURES AND TABLES
FIGURES
2.1 Occupational characteristics of the male population and of 49

winning and losing men, by party, Strathclyde, 1984
2.2 Percentage of winners by education/occupation type (Labour 50
men)
2.3 ‘Winning’ and ‘losing’ in Tiraspol and Strathclyde 66
TABLES
2.1 Proportion of women nominated by parties, District elections of 41

1984 in Strathclyde region, and their success rates compared to
those of men
2.2 Occupational sectors, male District Council candidates, by 45
party, compared with men in the electorate: factor of over-and
under-representation
2.3 Non-service workers among male District Council candidates, by 45
party, compared with men in the electorate: factor of over-and
under-representation
2.4 Success rate (% winners) of male Conservative and Labour 46
candidates, by further education
2.5 Success rate (% winners) of occupational sectors, by party 47
2.6 Proportion (%) of Conservative candidates from general 55
management and the business-linked professions: a comparison
of male winners, male losers, and women
2.7 Proportion (%) of Labour candidates with full-time further 55
education: a comparison of winning men, losing men, and
women
2.8 Proportion (%) of Labour candidates from a caring profession: 56
a comparison of male winners, male losers, and women
2.9 Proportion (%) of Labour candidates with a non-service 56
manual occupation: a comparison of winning men, losing men,
and women
vii
2.10 Success rates (%) of Labour candidates by sex and 58

socioeconomic characteristics
2.11 Characteristics of Tiraspol Deputies, 1950–67, by sex 67
3.1 Socioeconomic characteristics of Independent men 85
3.2 The occupation/employment groups of Independent men 86
3.3 Proportion (%) of each occupation/employment group who had 89
ever lost an election (the Everlosts)
3.4 Party identification of Independent men 92
3.5 Proportions (%) of party identifiers and party members among 93
Independent men compared with the adult UK population
4.1 Proportion (%) of candidates with full-time further education, 116
by sex and party
4.2 Occupational profiles of male candidates for the Labour party 117
and the SNP
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Three inter-related strands in my experience produced the impetus to write

this book. Chronologically speaking, the first of these was practical
involvement in conventional politics as an activist and parliamentary
candidate in the 1970s; this revealed surprising lacunae in the political
science literature some of which this book attempts to fill. The second was
a deepening concern with feminist ideas, which seemed to me to provide
profound insights into the nature of politics and the world in which we live
but without answering some of the most difficult questions modern women
have to face, in employment, in politics and in their family lives. It became
increasingly clear to me that these were very basic questions the women’s
movement had met and foundered on before; if history was not simply to
repeat itself, they should be confronted and, if possible, resolved. However,
it is a third factor, my role as a mother, which has held me to the task. This
is partly because my particular experience of motherhood (in the very
different contexts of shared and single parenthood but always as a
breadwinner) has forced me to apply my mind to uncomfortable facts
which feminism often seems inclined to fudge. Still more compellingly,
however, it has given me a sense of obligation to the future which has
made this book a personal responsibility impossible to evade.
The task could not have been accomplished without help. In particular, I
am greatly indebted to the Trustees of the Nuffield Foundation for funding
my research and providing the Fellowship which got the writing underway;
without their support and confidence the work would have been
impossible. The same can be said for the candidates and councillors who
responded to my questions and thus provided the raw material for part of
the analysis; I thank them all for their time and trouble and their good
humour and goodwill. I am also indebted to my friends and colleagues for
their encouragement and advice. Without the moral support of Mark
Franklin in the early stages of the work and Professor Jeremy Richardson
towards the end it might not have been completed; I am especially indebted
to the latter for making our department at the University of Strathclyde an
environment in which such long-term projects are still feasible for
individual members of the teaching staff, even in the present climate of
ix
pressure on the universities. I am also grateful to Tom Mackie for his

companionable interest in my work, to Jack Brand for technical advice and
to Stephen Tagg, Ann Mair and Sarinder Hunjan of the Social Statistics
Laboratory for their unfailing helpfulness. Further afield, I should like to
acknowledge a debt to Anne Phillips, whose timely advice gingered me to
further, vital efforts. I am also grateful to Ronald J. Hill for permission to
make new use of his Soviet data and to the Routledge editors and readers
for their advice. Above all, however, I must thank my family, Howard,
Keith and Sarah Robinson for their long-suffering support; it is to them
that I should like to dedicate this book.
INTRODUCTION
The great interest with which issues of gender and politics are received
today undoubtedly has its roots in the changes which have taken place in
women’s situation in the modern world, and particularly in their
widespread access to the kind of education which creates a public for ideas
and the thinkers and communicators to provide them. At the same time,
this interest is engendered by frustration, for women are a ‘public’ which is
largely outside public life. With a very few and arguable exceptions among
industrialised nations, women remain outside the centres of decision-
making throughout the world and the forms of status, influence and power
which are available to men continue to elude them. Cultural values continue
to marginalise their identity and interests (even though commercial
interests are only too eager and able to exploit them) and public policies
continue to reflect the priorities of men.
This has led to much impatience with the rate of change achieved by
women within existing systems and inconclusive argument about the
nature of the obstacles they face and how they may be overcome. Some
feminists have concluded that the only way forward is to reject these
systems altogether and opt instead for either revolution or deliberate non-
participation. For other feminists, who are probably the vast majority, the
idea of a women’s revolution is too fantastic to be entertained, while non-
participation seems tantamount to a negation of the struggle; it seems the
only hope is to progress by means of incremental change. In the end,
women’s participation may afford them sufficient leverage to make radical
changes in existing systems from within, with or without the help of men.
The irony, however, is that women who take part in order to modify or
even revolutionise the system face the same basic problem as those who
simply want to share the spoils on equal terms with men: how to reach
decision-making roles at all? To the extent that they succeed, they face an
even more profound and taxing question; how best to use their newfound
influence in pursuit of further change? Even if proportionality with men is
all that women seek from public life, it seems clear that great changes in
society and politics will be required before this can be achieved.
Unfortunately, it is by no means easy to agree on what these changes ought
xi
to be. The strategy that feminists employ will obviously depend on what
they think stands in their way, but whether they succeed, in any sense of
the word, will depend on how correctly the obstacles have been identified,
and also on how willing other women are to adopt their feminist goals.
The kind of changes that will promote women’s advance in politics can
hardly leave their broader social role and interests untouched; feminism is
controversial among women precisely because of its profound implications
for all women’s lives. Whether the women’s movement is trying to work
within existing systems or against them, it must eventually confront the
same unanswered question that was posed by Freud, ‘What do women
want?’
It is to both these crucial feminist issues—the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of
women’s difficult advance—that this book is addressed. Its central
argument is that women, caught between their female gender and their
aspirations in the world of men, face a scissors problem which is as old as
gender itself and more intractable than either conventional or feminist
political analysis has fully recognised. The foundation of the public sphere
and its dominant values on the gender role of men is one dimension of the
scissors; the other is the female role and its exterior location in the partly
‘private’ sphere. Thus women’s situation cuts two ways; as participants in
the essentially hierarchical systems devised by men they are but one of
many out-groups and subject to the same competitive rules as men, and yet
by virtue of their gender women are uniquely set apart, not just an out-
group but outsiders too. On the one hand, it is impossible to explain the
limited progress of women in the public sphere without an understanding of
the principles on which it is constructed and their effects on men as well as
women. At the same time, no strategy for changing women’s situation can
possibly succeed which does not fully take account of women’s gender role
as well as men’s. Without a grasp on both dimensions of the gender
scissors, the situation of women can be neither understood nor remedied.
Although the whole history of feminism could be described as an
unsuccessful effort to escape the gender scissors, it is a problem which seems
to take feminists in every generation by surprise, leaving them divided not
only among themselves but from the mass of ordinary women. Each
repetition of the movement’s cycle finds it trapped in the identical pattern
which is the hallmark of the scissors problem, of half-acknowledged
inconsistencies among its goals and a profound, but unacknowledged
conflict between the stated aims of feminism and the underlying, long-term
gender implications of the policies that feminists pursue. Along with this
goes a recurring tendency to lose sight of the realities on which male
politics are based, leading to over-optimism about what can readily be
achieved and the disillusionment which this inevitably brings in its train.
The need to mark out both dimensions of the scissors problem clearly
and measure feminist strategies according to how well designed they are to
xii
deal with it, has therefore been the principal motivation for this book. The
task has gained a special urgency from the recent appearance, for the
second time this century, of what look like new departures in feminist
conceptions of their strategy and goals, coinciding as they did before with
cases of unusual access on the part of feminists to positions of political
power. The hopes aroused by the advance of Nordic feminism, in
particular, demand our urgent scrutiny and at the same time make it all the
more important to analyse the failures of the past, lest we repeat them
now.
The scope and structure of the book reflect the nature of the scissors
problem and its two-dimensional effect on women’s lives. It is in two parts,
integrally related by their common theoretical framework and ultimate
object, but each more closely concerned with one dimension of the scissors:
Part 1 with the existing, male-dominated order and the obstacles it presents
to women’s political advance, and Part 2 with women’s situation and the
way the scissors problem bears on feminist strategies for change. Like the
male and female worlds of which they treat, the themes and perspectives of
these parts are intertwined and often overlap but are also very unalike in
some respects.
For one thing, although the questions asked are inextricably linked—
until we really understand things as they are, how can we hope to change
them according to our will?—the research demands they make are very
different. Being equally at home myself in quantitative and more
traditional approaches to political science, I have felt free to go about each
part of the problem in what seemed the most appropriate way, but this has
led to considerable differences in the methods and materials used. Whereas
the longer, second part (ironically, in view of its more radical content and
perspective) is largely traditional in its analytical approach and the
‘literary’ kind of sources used, an intensive empirical investigation is
conducted in Part 1, where most of the data, whether quantitative or
qualitative, are of survey origin. The theoretical, historical and cross-
cultural range of the book is also more than usually wide. Driven by the
universal nature and profound significance of the issues in question (and
also being anxious to do justice to those feminists whose ideas I have felt
bound to challenge in Part 2), I have tried to create as strong a comparative
framework and empirical basis for both parts of the book as is within my
powers. Like others before me, I have also found it quite impossible to
confine the issue of women’s situation within the frontiers of a single
academic discipline. The result is a fairly long and complex work, which
enters in some detail into the experience of men and women in different
countries and at different times, and draws on the insights of several
disciplines in the analysis of feminist ideas. Some of its elements might even
stand alone as case-studies of their kind: for example, the three empirical
chapters of Part 1 as self-contained studies of different aspects of
xiii
recruitment (and all three together as a single work); Chapter 8 as a critical

review of women’s gender theories; and other sections of Part 2 as separate
studies of feminism and political change in specific countries at specific
times. This is incidental to the plan, however; each element is conceived as
being essential to the whole.
The first objective of the book is to examine the virtually universal
pattern of male dominance in the recruitment of political elites. Why are
men always dominant, irrespective of the immense differences in culture
and political system which exist even within the developed world, let alone
between the industrialised nations and the rest? How is it possible, too, for
such identical effects to be produced in almost every case: firstly that more
men than women seek entry to elites and proportionately even more
succeed and, secondly, that the higher up a political hierarchy we look, the
smaller is the proportion of women to be found? What are the conditions,
if any, in which the pattern may be changed?
It may seem surprising that a phenomenon so universal and also,
nowadays, so problematic as the gender pattern of recruitment should still
require an explanation. One reason is that the subject of recruitment in
itself has been less systematically studied than one might suppose. Although
a lot of work has gone into identifying different stages in the recruitment
process and the range of possible selectors, and a link between political
recruitment and individual socio-economic resources has been observed (or
else assumed) in some studies of a single setting, no attempt has been made
to develop this into a general theory or extend into comparative research;
the contrast with the field of mass political participation, with its highly
developed comparative theory and empirical findings, is remarkable.
Indeed, there is no general theory of recruitment at all and much of the
‘recruitment’ literature scarcely deserves the name; so-called recruitment
studies are often mere descriptions of elites.
It thus devolves on women, as the interested parties, to provide the
theory and demonstrate the laws by which they are excluded. However,
although contemporary feminist political analysis has provided immensely
valuable insights into the nature of politics in general, it has been less
successful in relating them to specific issues like recruitment and testing
general theories in the field. Athough the feminist perspective has made it
impossible any longer to ignore the political character of male-female
relations and women’s experience is now accepted as a legitimate field of
study, neither theory nor findings have been fully integrated into the
mainstream of political research. As a result, the strength of women’s
studies has ironically had something of the same marginalising effect as the
sexism of an earlier generation of male political scientists who dismissed
the virtual absence of women from the public sphere as a ‘natural’ function
of their apolitical outlook and private role; it focuses attention on women
themselves as the key to their problem rather than the nature of the
xiv
systems in which they are obliged to act. Reinforced by contemporary

academic interest in secondary, personal/psychological explanations for
political behaviour, it is one source of the widely held but questionable idea
that women’s situation can be changed by changing women, without also
changing (or even fully understanding) how men have organised the world.
Part 1 sets out to redress the balance by combining a feminist perspective
with the insights of traditional political analysis and the methods of
behavioural research. The dual object is to develop a theory which explains
the universal nature of the gender pattern of recruitment in terms of the
systems where it is produced and then to demonstrate the theory in the
field. Starting from the universal dichotomy of male and female gender,
Chapter 1 draws on the common properties of all male systems to present a
general theory of the relationship between political values, socio-economic
resources and elite recruitment which explains recruitment patterns among
men. As for the gender pattern, the key lies in the scissors problem. In
terms of recruitment, the first blade of the scissors is that whatever
resources are associated with success among men, women as an out-group
will have less of them, their situation in this respect being the same as that
of other out-groups; women are like ‘losing’ men. The second blade of the
scissors is that whatever distinctive attributes women possess by virtue of
their gender will be of little use to them when they compete on ‘equal
terms’ with men; the only ‘right’ resources are those possessed by ‘winning’
men. The theory not only accounts for the gender pattern in general but
explains specifically why it remains unmodified by quite substantial
variation in the basis of recruitment among men, such as occurs when
‘modifying’ institutions intervene in the recruitment process on behalf of
disadvantaged groups; very different kinds of men succeed in different
cases but the gender outcome virtually always is the same. A set of
hypotheses is proposed which actually predict the gender outcome very
precisely in all cases from the patterns of recruitment among men,
irrespective of the selectors involved, the political context or the models or
recruitment which are at work.
These hypotheses are tested in a comparative, empirical study of
recruitment which employs a more rigorous methodology than sadly is
usual in this field. The investigation has three parts, dealing respectively
with major party, non-partisan and minor party recruitment and drawing
on a large body of new survey and interview data collected by the author
for the purpose, as well as secondary data and other published sources. It is
located in a broad range of institutional frameworks and political cultures,
including the three very different partisan settings provided by the USA,
Scotland and the former USSR in Chapter 2; Scottish and American
contexts of ‘non-partisan’ recruitment in Chapter 3; and a range of Scottish
and other European examples of minor party recruitment in Chapter 4.
Although this research is not cross-national in the strict sense of an
xv
identical study performed in different countries at a single point in time,

the comparative framework is an intrinsic part of the research design; given
the universal rules that the scissors hypotheses are intended to explain, it is
essential to demonstrate them at work in the greatest possible diversity of
political cultures and system-types. At the same time, particular use has
been made of the unusually rich and detailed seam of local Scottish data,
which not only meet all the standards of design, depth and precision laid
down in Chapter 2 but also permit an extended analysis of individual
experience in Chapter 3, where in-depth interviews are the focus of
analysis and the links between socioeconomic attributes and personal/
psychological orientations and experience can be made explicit.
The results of all three studies are remarkably consistent. What they
reveal is a world so structured by male values and the hierarchical
relationships which they sustain in economy, society and polity, that the
parameters of change are very narrow even for men. Where women are
concerned, the finding is the same in every context and irrespective of
whether it is the role of individuals, political parties or other institutions in
the recruitment process which is being analysed: that without an absolute
revolution in either the distribution of resources or the political criteria
employed by men, no significant and lasting change in women’s access to
elites is feasible. The only open door (and it is but very slightly ajar) is that
of education, with its two-way, but inherently limited effects, on the
attributes of women and the attitudes of men.
If the only purpose of this book were to describe things as they are, the
matter could rest here. It is our capacity to change these things, however,
which is its ultimate concern and the function of Part 1 is to lay the
groundwork for Part 2. In order to explain the gender pattern of
recruitment, it has opened a window on the nature of male-dominated
systems and the place of women in them, in the process identifying the
prerequisites for change. Unfortunately, however, the gender scissors are
not just the key to patterns of recruitment, but a summary statement of
women’s whole situation in a gendered and male-dominated world. In such
a world as this, is it really in women’s power to achieve the kind of
internal revolution in the public sphere which a significant change in their
political status would require? Can anything as universal as the exclusion of
women from political power conceivably be changed unless we look
beyond existing systems to their origins and make the changes there? Or
are such changes already taking place? If so, what role can feminism play in
change and how will it affect our lives? The theory and empirical findings
of Part 1 thus provide the framework and, at several levels, the questions to
be answered in Part 2. The framework is the gender scissors and the
problem it creates for women in a political world which has been organised
by men; the questions are identified by the way the scissors works against
them and the nature of the underlying obstacles to change.
xvi
At one level, this new emphasis on change involves the continuing theme
of recruitment and empirical enquiry, albeit of a rather different kind. Are
those very few but striking instances, past and present, in which the gender
pattern has apparently been breached merely minor variations in the
pattern, or are they possible harbingers of a more widespread change?
Have they occured because of changes in the distribution of resources
between the sexes, or in male values, or in both? In any case, how could
such change occur? These questions lead directly to the next level of
enquiry. Changes in the distribution of education and its valuation by men
have been signalled by Part 1 as the most likely reason for exceptional
advance on women’s part. However, is not education also a crucial factor
in the rise and development of feminism as a social movement? Certainly,
feminism of one kind or another has been a highly visible feature in the
context of every deviant recruitment case. What contribution has been
made by the political consciousness and strategy of women in the
exceptional cases? Why did the feminism of earlier generations fail to live
up to its promise, even in the relatively favourable context of these special
cases? And has it more potential now? In short, if women want to change
the world, are they going about it the right way?
The approach required to tackle questions of this kind is necessarily of a
very different order from that adopted in Part 1, even where recruitment is
concerned. While the object of earlier chapters is to prove the general rule,
the focus is on the exceptions now and qualitative rather than quantitative
methods are more appropriate to an understanding of the historical,
socioeconomic and cultural contexts from which they spring and the role in
them of feminism. However, the differences from Part 1 are necessarily
much more profound than this.
Political scientists are notoriously better at describing things as they are
than at predicting change and a tendency to conceive the world in static
terms is implicit in an empirical investigation of the kind presented in
Part 1; the explanation for the gender pattern also sets the bounds on
change. The importance of socio-economic factors in explaining politics
(and they are crucial in the present case), also reinforces this deterministic
bias and the pessimism it breeds. Yet human affairs are never static and the
role of ideas in achieving change, albeit unquantifiable, can never be ruled
out. Part 1 has made the obstacles extremely clear, but an emphasis on
change and the potential role of feminism in promoting it implies that
human will and understanding are significant elements in the scheme of
things.
Up to a point, the concept of feminism as a social movement offers a
conventional framework for this more dynamic and voluntarist approach
but although the aims, origins and strategic dilemmas of the women’s
movement can be compared with those of other social movements (just as
women are compared with other out-groups in Part 1), a new perspective is
xvii
also required. It is impossible to analyse the situation and interests of

women and evaluate the competing strands of modern feminism without
being confronted by the gender basis of the public sphere and the fact that
women are not only participants inside male-dominated systems but, as
females, stand outside them too. This is the second dimension of the gender
scissors, and the only perspective which can bring it fully into view is that
of women themselves. No movement which seriously intends to change the
situation of women can afford to overlook the values and functions of the
female role, any more than it can ignore the male-centred basis of the
public sphere. The only appropriate feminist strategy is one which
recognises both dimensions of the scissors and is at heart a strategy to deal
with them. If no escape route from the scissors can be found, whichever
way they turn, then gender itself is the issue women must address.
The foundation for this new approach is laid in Chapter 5, where the
character and significance of feminism as a social movement are discussed
in terms of social movement theory and the gender problem. These themes
are further developed in Chapter 6, where the role of education in the
development of a favourable climate for feminist ideas and the strategic
options open to the women’s movement are discussed. Two great and
enduring strands in modern feminism are those of equal rights and socialist
feminism, both of them closely associated with competing male ideologies
and structures, as well as with historical cases of exceptional, but
unsustained advance on women’s part. Since both these kinds of feminism
continue to inform and divide the women’s movement throughout the
world (and between them probably have more adherents among women
politicians than all the rest), it is vitally important for feminists to assess
their strategies and identify the long-term implications of their aims. The
analysis reveals much common ground between the two and in spite of
their considerable achievements it points to gender and its origin in
reproductive roles as a trap which neither has escaped or even fully
understood.
Chapter 7 tests this analysis of equal rights and socialist feminism in the
setting of two remarkable late nineteenth-and early twentieth-
century exceptions to the general recruitment rule. The first case is that of
Finland during and after its constitutional struggle for independence, when
the proportion of women elected to the first Riksdag in 1908 and the
mobilisation of women to the feminist cause was far greater than in any
other Scandinavian country until the 1970s (or than Westminster or the US
Congress have experienced yet). The second is that of Russia before and
after 1917, when the recruitment of women to revolutionary elites and the
apparent integration of feminism into the political programmes of men had
reached levels which have yet to be surpassed. In the event, neither
capitalist, democratic Finland nor state socialist Russia fulfilled their
feminist promise and the object here is to discover why these unusual
xviii
opportunities for women arose in the first place and show why feminists
could not use them as a basis for more long-term, incremental change.
Both levels of analysis, theoretical and empirical, point to gender strategy
as the key to women’s active role in change. Yet whereas the related issue of
organisational strategy has been addressed by feminists (and even by a few
political scientists) the very need for the women’s movement to have a
gender strategy at all is rarely recognised. Nor have the gender implications
of contemporary feminist policies and current social trends been
thoroughly explored. This is certainly not for want of theoretical material;
nearly all the most creative feminist political thinkers have written
extensively, and in some cases exclusively about gender, while its
relationship with reproductive roles has exercised the minds of many
women anthropologists and students of psychology. The trouble is that this
body of work is rarely reviewed and analysed in terms of strategy; not
surprisingly, the result is that a vast gulf exists between theories of gender
on the one hand and, on the other, the development of feminist
programmes of action and the choices made by individual women in their
personal lives. The object of Chapter 8 is to bridge this gap by returning to
the work of women gender theorists in order to compare their ideas and
establish what constructive gender strategies can be derived from them.
The diversity of these ideas and the wide range of disciplines on which
they draw makes this an intellectually challenging, but most rewarding
exercise. Even if feminists remain sharply divided and often inconsistent in
the remedies they prescribe, there is nonetheless a considerable degree of
consensus about the sources of the gender problem and how far it is
susceptible to conscious strategies for change. If these ideas are pursued to
their logical conclusion, the outline of a coherent gender strategy does
emerge and, along with it, a basis for evaluating public policies and social
trends in feminist terms.
Whether the path this study indicates is one that many women would
wish to take is quite another matter. Social trends suggest that women
in general are, to say the least, ambivalent about the kind of change in
gender roles it would involve; indeed, with the insights given by this study,
we can even say that the main new path they are pursuing for their
liberation is more likely to reinforce the gender status quo than change it.
The question then must be how the contemporary women’s movement is
matching up to this dilemma; are feminists aware of the true nature of the
problem and are they developing coherent and potentially effective policies
to deal with it? Or are they really, like so many of their predecessors,
tending to defeat their object by trying to face two ways at once?
Once again, the best arena for observing feminist strategies in action is
where women have gained unusual access to decision-making roles and
hence, perhaps, the chance to start a process of sequential change. The
final chapter therefore returns to the exceptional recruitment cases and in
xix
the process draws together both dimensions of this enquiry: the political
world of men with its inbuilt parameters of change and the women’s
movement’s struggle with the fundamental gender problem. Three
contemporary case-studies are presented, chosen to represent the widest
possible range of favourable political contexts and recruitment
opportunities and the most developed feminist strategies available to
women at the present time. The first is that of the West German Greens,
which up until the reunification of Germany was not only the most
conventionally successful of the ‘new’ social movements in Europe but
uniquely open to the mass mobilisation and recruitment of women to
elites. The second is Norway, where the numerical advance of women has
not only cut across the party system and brought parity in government
itself, but is also being carried over from elected office to the corporate
structures which play a crucial role in Nordic policy-making; Norwegian
feminists have played a prominent part in these developments and in the
process have developed a distinctive, unusually gender-oriented strategy.
The third is Iceland, where the wholly female and feminist Kwennalistinn
suddenly acquired a pivotal role in the Icelandic parliament, mainly on the
basis of a’women’s vote’. Once more, the case-studies are largely self-
contained but invite comparison, not only with each other but also with
Finnish and Soviet experience. Between them, these cases represent the
most advanced frontiers of feminist political thought and action in the
present day and offer an unparalleled opportunity to compare immensely
varied feminist strategies and visions of a better world. If the problem
nature has dealt women is not in fact insoluble, then this is where the
answer is most likely to be taking shape.
Part 1
1
GENDER AND RECRUITMENT THE
NATURE OF THE PROBLEM
THE GENDER PATTERN IN ELITE RECRUITMENT

In the last hundred years women in advanced societies have generally
achieved the right to own property, enter paid employment, vote and hold
political office. They have also gained universal access to formal education
on more or less equal terms with men, thus acquiring an attribute which a
long line of researchers from Lipset onwards have found to be associated
with the development in men of a disposition to engage in political activity.1
The effect of these changes on the political behaviour of women, both in
absolute terms and relative to men, has been in some respects dramatic and
immediate. For example, as soon as they were given the opportunity
women began to vote in large proportions and the first women to win
election to the national legislatures of Britain and many other western
societies did so within a matter of months after becoming eligible2 In some
respects, however, change was more gradual. Indeed, when political
scientists began seriously to study patterns of participation after the Second
World War it was not the speed of women’s assimilation which they found
striking, but the fact that in almost all respects they had still not caught up
with the male participatory norm. It was not until the late 1960s and
1970s that the gender gap in forms of what is usually described as ‘mass’
participation was found to be diminishing rapidly.3 These changes have
still, in the 1990s, not seriously impinged on men’s dominance of political
elites, even though in countries such as Britain and the USA the disparity in
low level participation has nearly disappeared. Two ‘almost iron’ laws of
women’s elite penetration are found to be in general operation even now:
1 That wherever political rewards exist which are desirable to men,

relatively few women will be found seeking, and even fewer securing
them.
2 That wherever there is a hierarchy of such rewards, then the higher up
the hierarchy we look, the smaller the proportion of women will be.
GENDER AND RECRUITMENT 3
The operation of the first of these contemporary laws is both

straightforward and obvious. At every level of contested election for public
office, anywhere in the world that we choose to look, we find that female
candidacies are grossly outnumbered by those of men, even after anything
up to eighty years of becoming eligible to stand. Even in Scandinavia the
proportion of women among parliamentary candidates has on only two
occasions been reported as over a third.4 It was not until 1983 that women
as a percentage proportion of candidacies for the House of Commons even
got into double figures for the first time and that position has not yet been
reached in the United States.5 At the local level women are usually more
likely to appear as candidates in most advanced societies, but still not at all
in proportion to their presence in the electorate.
It is also an almost invariable feature of competition for office, local as
well as national, that the success rate of women candidates is lower than
that of men. In Britain indeed, the gap between women’s aspirations to
office and their success in achieving it has become more, not less
pronounced with time; until 1987, the increase in women as a proportion
of parliamentary candidates in post-war elections was actually correlated
negatively not only, as one would expect, with the proportion who succeed
but also with the absolute number of women MPs.
The resulting pattern is well known. Governments throughout the world
are dominated by men, notwithstanding the occasional appearance of a
personally dominant female head of government, such as Mrs Thatcher;
such women rulers have to be looked at in the context of the whole
population of rulers and have never been more numerous across the world
than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Norway at the time of
writing, is the only, and first ever, exception to this general rule; of the
eighteen Cabinet members, nearly half (including Prime Minister Gro
Harlem-Bruntland) are women. In national legislatures, or their functional
equivalents in one-party states, the highest female representation is also to
be found in Scandinavia, but even there it lags considerably behind that of
men.6 More characteristic is Britain, where over half the population but
only 6.3 per cent of the MPs elected in 1987, were women (a female
success rate of only 8.3 per cent, compared to 27.2 per cent for men).7 This
derisory figure was not only the highest proportion of women there had
ever been in the House of Commons, but represented a recovery as much
as an advance. The previous highpoint of 4.6 per cent was in 1964, after
which the proportion declined to around 3.6 per cent, almost exactly the
proportion that was found in the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union8 and still obtains in the United States Congress.
In the case of the Labour party (which paradoxically claims to be the only
party a genuine feminist should support in Britain), the last time this party
reached its 1987 total of twenty-five women MPs was in 1945. Of fifty-six
states cited in a recent overview, nearly half had a female presence in their
4 POLITICS, FEMINISM AND THE REFORMATION OF GENDER
national legislatures of 5 per cent or less and only eighteen had 10 per cent
or more.9 Even after the general election of April 1992, Britain could not
be numbered among the latter: at only 9.2 per cent, the proportion of women
still has not made it into double figures.
The second ‘almost iron’ law—that the proportion of women will vary
inversely with the hierarchy of rewards—is slightly less obvious in its
operation, though no less reliable. Although in most cases it operates as
straightforwardly as in Britain, where the proportion of women rises to 22
per cent of district councils in England and Wales (19.5 per cent in
Scotland), in the United States only 10 per cent of mayors and local council
members were female in the 1980s10 and this proportion is 3 per cent less
than is found at the higher level of state legislatures. In Scandinavia, the
proportion of women in local councils varies between 21 and 29 per cent,
but this is not very different from the proportion to be found in national
legislatures.
If we look more closely, however, and bear in mind that we are
concerned with the rewards of office and not its constitutional status, it
becomes clear that most if f not all cases which appear to break the rule are
really illustrations of a consistent relationship between rewards and
gender. In political systems like the British where the formal hierarchy of
office, ranging from national to local office, coincides with the hierarchy of
rewards—such as money, status and power—the hierarchy of female under-
representation coincides exactly with the pyramid of office. Similarly in the
Soviet Union (where the proportion of women could be as high as 50 per
cent in the local soviets but real power resided in the Communist Party
committees), there was a sharp decline in female representation when one
moved up the local hierarchy. In fact, when the relative status of local
soviet and Party office are taken into account, the British and Soviet cases
are both perfect illustrations of a direct relationship between the hierarchy
of office and the gender pattern. There is in both cases a strong element of
service involved in local government office and for most people little or no
prospect of career advancement or financial gain. Rewards must be
measured in terms of power, which is severely limited by that of central
government in a unitary system, (and by that of the Party in the Soviet
case) and status, which reduces sharply as one moves down the formal
hierarchy from national office. The hierarchical pattern is therefore
perfectly straightforward. In the United States, the real distribution of
rewards is rather different and local office may be prized and hotly
contested by men for the power and pecuniary advantage it brings.11 It is
within the levels of state and local elites that the pyramid effect is to be
found, with the proportion of women varying inversely with the size of the
state legislature and the members’ pay12 and with the salary and scope of
the local office.13
We thus have a universal gender pattern in political elite recruitment

which rests upon the three components of our ‘almost iron’ laws; the
under-representation of women among the candidates for office; their
lower success rate than that of men; and the inverse relationship of their
participation and success to the rewards of the office sought. The problem
is that no satisfactory explanation for the universal character of this pattern
has yet been advanced.
THE LIMITATIONS OF EXISTING EXPLANATIONS

Although most socialists and some feminists have claimed to have the key
to women’s political equality, the universality and durability of the gender
pattern has confounded their expectations as well as those of political
scientists; women have been failed not only by traditional power structures
but also by socialist states and active women’s movements. The Soviet
Union was committed to sex equality since its inception, with the education
of women and their induction into the paid labour force being articles of
public policy as well as dogma throughout its history. Yet the results of
seventy-three years of Soviet power brought women no nearer the centres of
political power than, for example, seventy-three years of traditional male
chauvinism in Mediterranean Greece. Nor do the claims of socialist parties
(or trade unions) in Western Europe to be the natural vehicle for women’s
progress stand up to examination. On the other hand, where women in the
USA have pioneered the modern women’s movement and made vigorous
use of their own structures as pressure groups within the arena of interests,
the same derisory results are found as in Britain, where no coherent and
structured women’s movement exists at all, and in the Soviet Union, where
feminists ‘from below’ until recently risked jail or deportation.14
There is one other aspect of political systems which has attracted such
considerable attention as an explanation for variation within the gender
pattern as to be treated by some people almost as an adequate explanation
for the pattern itself; this is the kind of electoral system in use. However,
while it is true that a cross-national comparison of national legislatures in
recent times shows a definite relationship between the incidence of
proportional representation and the proportion of women elected,15 this
explanation does not stand up when examined over time; before the sudden
improvement of recent times, proportional representation systems had
already existed for decades in Norway and Denmark with the same
infinitesimal proportion of women legislators as everywhere else.16
Electoral systems clearly do not offer a primary explanation in themselves
but provide conditions which are more or less responsive to changes in the
real, underlying causes of the gender pattern.
The theory and findings of political participation research are equally
unable to explain the gender results. The most fruitful emphasis of this
research has been on the centrality of socio-economic status in defining

population categories which are more or less likely to participate in politics,
with education identified by Almond and Verba as the crucial determinant
of ‘civic’ or participatory political orientations17 and commonly regarded
as the best independent ‘predictor’ of actual participation. Yet even at the
level of grass-roots participation there are gender gaps which appear to
resist this explanation, so that after controlling for education and any other
participation-related variables they may have at their command, such
analysts as Duverger, the authors of The American Voter and Verba, Nie
and Kim resort in their turn to sex roles as the residual explanation for sex
differences.18
The problem at the elite level is of course much greater, for the spread of
education has had scarcely any impact there, with some of the worst levels
of female representation in national legislatures occurring in the most
advanced societies. Among the latter, indeed, it is in America, where
further education is more generally available to women than anywhere else
in the world apart from the former Soviet Union (there being even more
college-educated women in the USA than men) that some of the worst
female elite participation outcomes are recorded, even at the local level.
Empirical participation research also poses another conundrum. Cross-
national study has shown that the relationship between socioeconomic
status (ses) and grass-roots political participation is modified in favour of
low-ses individuals when the institutional context includes redistributive
institutions, i.e. institutions like trade unions, socialist parties and other
organisations which seek to redistribute social goods in favour of less
advantaged groups. As Verba, Nie and Kim have shown, one of the things
which gets redistributed by these agencies is the pattern of grass-roots
political participation.19 Where they are active, mobilising members of
their low-ses constituency and providing an organisational framework for
their political activity, the participation gap between the high and the low
ses-groups begins perceptibly to close. That is to say, it begins to close
among men; low-ses men participate at a rate closer to that of high-ses
men. Low-ses women, however, do not. In fact, the existence of
redistributive institutions is actually found to increase the gender gap; not
only are women less likely to join the institutions concerned than are the
men, but the unequalising effects of this are compounded by the fact that
when they do join ‘such affiliation has less payoff in terms of increased
political activity’ for women than it does for men.20 Indeed, the only
country where the political activity of women is found to gain as much as
men’s from their affiliation to politically involved institutions is the USA,
where no redistributive institutions are held to exist.21
Thus the empirical study of participation leads to exactly the same
paradox as confronts the feminist who puts her trust in socialism:
redistributive parties ought to advance the interests of women relative to
men (and they frequently profess to do so) but somehow, mysteriously,

they do not.
The questions the gender pattern demands, then, are why, and how, are
these invariable effects produced? If the spread of education has not closed
the gender gap in political elites; if a commitment to feminism, either from
‘above’ in state or party policies, or from ‘below’ in the form of the women’s
movement makes no real difference; if the electoral ‘rules of the game’ can
vary without an invariable effect on the pattern; and if the main conclusions
of participation study (which explains so much in the case of men) do not
explain the gender outcomes, there is certainly a mystery here to be solved.
Small wonder that so many men have side-stepped the problem by
concluding that there is something intrinsically wrong with women which
accounts for it (such as their supposedly ‘apolitical’ nature) and that some
women have retaliated with the counter-proposition that there is indeed
something wrong, but with the nature of men, not women.
It is more constructive, however, when we fail to come up with answers,
to ask ourselves if it is not the approach which has been at fault. In the
following pages, a new theoretical approach to the problem is conceived,
which draws on anthropological and historical as well as political science
perspectives to explain the universal gender pattern. Precise hypotheses are
constructed, which predict the gender outcome in vastly different settings
and in subsequent chapters are put to the proof.
TOWARDS AN EXPLANATION OF THE GENDER

PATTERN
Such a universal phenomenon as the gender pattern of recruitment
obviously requires an equally universal explanation. It should be equally
obvious that this explanation will not be located entirely in the situation
and behaviour of women themselves. Nor will a single setting suffice for its
detection and demonstration. The problem demands a comparative
approach, and must encompass men as well as women. There are two main
reasons for this.
In the first place (as anthropologists first pointed out more than fifty
years ago), although in all societies women are distinguished from men
because they bear the children, and the differences in reproductive role are
always the kernel around which gender roles are culturally constructed, the
way these roles are constituted and the connections which are drawn
between reproduction and other aspects of adult life are extremely
variable. As a result, the actual content of gender roles and the degree of
their differentiation vary enormously from one society and culture to
another.22 What is women’s work in one place and time, is men’s in
another and vice versa. Thus, for example, the medical profession is a male
preserve in the industrialised west, but was predominantly female in the
Soviet Union. Farm work is regarded as too physically demanding for

women in most of Europe and North America, yet most of the
(unmechanised) agricultural labour in many Third World countries is done
by women, and the rural work-force is predominantly female in the former
Soviet Union, too. Until the early years of this century, clerical jobs in all
societies were almostly exclusively performed by men, yet have been
regarded ever since as ‘women’s work’ in the industrialised world. The
variations which existed from one primitive society to another were
apparently no less startling; deep sea fishing, we are told by Lewenhak,
was normally the preserve of men among Polynesians, but off Cape Horn,
of all places, it was the role of women and only girls were taught how to
swim.23
The degree to which societies recognise a difference between the worlds
of men and women and demand their separation varies even more
strikingly. Women’s questioning of the ‘female role’ has surfaced mainly in
advanced societies, yet from the perspective of institutions of sex-
segregation like purdah, gender differentiation in the west appears so slight
as to be almost non-existent. In fact the only cultural response to biological
sex that does not vary from from one society from another, as the
anthropologists have also pointed out, is that the attributes assigned to
men, whatever they may be, are everywhere more highly valued and
rewarded than those of women.24
In practice, then, there are only three fixed characteristics of gender roles.
The first is the fact of their universal existence. The second is that women
everywhere have primary responsibility for childcare. The third, and least
adequately explored in its implications, is that one set of values-those of
men-is always dominant.
What this means is that the dominance of male values has crucial
implications for men as well as women, for these values determine not only
the relationship between men and women but relations among men
themselves. Whether the source of these values and their supremacy lies in
the innate characteristics of men or in a universal cultural response to the
existence of two sexes with very different reproductive roles—or in
a combination of the two—is not the point at this juncture, though it will
be crucial to any assessment of the prospects for a society without any
gender (as opposed to reproductive) roles at all. For the moment, it is
enough to note that when women seek to do the same things as men:
when, for example, they begin to compete for entry to political elites, they
do so within systems which have been set up by men for their own
purposes and which reflect their values.
This brings us to the the second, interrelated reason why we must look
beyond the experience of women in order to explain it—the fact that a
general condition of subordination is not specific to women, but one which
they share, because of the nature of male values, with many men. In terms
of the political system, what this means is that women are never the only
political out-group. Indeed their uniqueness lies in being the only out-group
which does not include men. Political systems as we know them—that is,
male-dominated political systems—abound with out-groups, such as
ethnic, racial and linguistic groups; slaves or serfs; groups or classes
identified by their relationship to the productive process, such as peasants
and industrial workers; religious sects; and, of course, ‘those who are
always with us’—the poor. An explanation of the gender pattern which is
rooted in the female gender role cannot account for the existence of these
other out-groups any more than colour, creed or class can be used to
explain the problems of women in general.
When women encounter a problem within the systems of men (like that
of access to political elites) and this is a problem for men too, it should be
obvious that the explanation for the problem cannot lie solely in the unique
and culture-specific features of their own, female situation, precisely
because it is unique to women. Even if we are careful to take a comparative
approach and succeed in distinguishing a common core of female gender
everywhere, a theoretical approach which is confined to the general
consequences which flow from women’s gender role and ignores their
interdependence with those which flow from the dominance of men can
never provide more than a partial explanation for a phenomenon which is
rooted in both. To understand the universal political implications of gender
and how they are related to the equally universal implications of out-group
status for groups that are all-male or mixed, we must look to both the
general character of gender relations and the common properties of the
systems in which women are seeking to advance, recognising that the
common denominator of both is the dominance of men, over women in the
one case and over men as well in the other.
It is a fact, none the less, that the tendency of theoretical approaches to
the gender problem has been either (a) to marginalise it as secondary to
such primary male concerns as socialism or (b) to concentrate more or less
exclusively on the social-cultural situation and characteristics of women in
particular contexts, emphasising such overlapping concepts as gender
socialisation,25 social role constraint26 and even ‘lifestyle’,27 which are to a
large extent inevitably culture-specific and also add as much to our
knowledge of the consequences as the causes of male dominance. Valuable
as some of these latter contributions are in themselves, their findings are
limited by the lack of scope for generalisation and the need for a more
thorough exploration of their relationship to the situation of men.
Empirically these approaches encounter problems, too. History has
shown that it is only too easy to realise socialist objectives without altering
the condition of women relative to men at all. On the other tack, the
findings of socialisation studies on both sides of the Atlantic are
inconsistent and at best inconclusive28 and though it seems obvious that
women’s social roles must severely inhibit their participation at the national
level of politics, none of the variants on the social role theme can account
for women’s gross underrepresentation in local politics, their lower success
rate at all levels, and the fact that the most striking source of variation in
the proportion of women in national legislatures is not, as this perspective
would suggest, the local variation in women’s social roles but is instead the
kind of electoral system in use. Thus the proportion of women in the
Italian legislature is frequently higher than in Britain and the United
States29 and the recent numerical advance of Scandinavian women in the
traditional political structures has not, contrary to the popular impression
in other countries, been the result of any major shift in childcare
responsibilities or the female gender role.30 Furthermore, the European
Parliament, with its extraordinary inconveniences of distance and
alternating locations in two different cities, has turned out to be
comparatively attractive to women political aspirants in some of the more
peripheral parts of Europe; 18 per cent of the UK’s candidates in 1984
were women, which is only 4 per cent short of the proportion which stood
in the Scottish District elections of the previous month and compares with
11 per cent of the candidates in the General Election of 1983. In addition,
although the lowest proportion of women elected to any of the national
contingents in the European Parliament was 8 per cent from peripheral,
male-chauvinist Greece, this is nearly twice as great as the highest
proportion of women ‘liberated’ America has ever sent to Congress.31
There are clearly other forces forces at work here than socialisation and
social role constraints and since the pattern occurs independently of
variation not only in gender roles but also in levels of industrialisation and
democratisation, we cannot look to the latter for a primary explanation
either. The evidence points strongly to the objectives of men and the nature
of their political relations as the place to start looking for the explanation.
It is the second of our ‘almost iron’ laws which is at work and we must
seek its foundations not so much in women themselves as in the values and
behaviour of men.
THE NATURE OF MALE-DOMINATED POLITICAL

SYSTEMS
There are two common properties of all the systems created by men: their
competitive inegalitarianism and the interdependence of social, economic
and political resources. The whole history of men is one of competition for
the objects they value, which are consequently always in short supply.
Relations among them, like those of men with women, are based on the
unequal distribution of these values and are therefore always those of
hierarchy and dominance—hence the very existence of elites and of in-and
out-groups in the first place. Indeed, the very function of politics, according
to such disparate sources as Locke, Rousseau and Marx, is to defend and

regulate this inequality and, as Dahl reminds us, the relationship between
resources in the different spheres is always a dynamic one.32 Socio-
economic resources are converted into political status and the polity is a
principal arena of competition among men precisely because political
power serves in its turn to defend, maintain or challenge the distribution of
resources in the other fields.
This dynamic interdependence between social, economic and political
status is at one and the same time the explanation of the ability of ingroups
to become self-perpetuating elites (i.e. to resist change) and the reason why
the reverberations of change in one field, such as economic relations, are
invariably felt in the others and may lead to the actual replacement of
incumbent elites. While it is in the interest of everyone, some of the time, to
have sufficient social, political and economic stability to enjoy what he has
in peace, the complete absence of competition is rarely in anyone’s interest,
because it is difficult to be satisfied with what he has got when there is a
possibility of getting more. Hence the perpetual pursuit of peace and war,
co-operation and conflict. Hence, too, the constantly shifting perceptions
of what constitutes the best kind of political system and the most desirable
set of international relations, as political values and goals respond to
changes in the distribution of competitive forces and expectations.
It follows that when women compete with men for access to political
elites, they do so on the terms already established by men for competition
among themselves and in political systems which already contain
outgroups of men. The success of women in politics, like that of any male
out-group, cannot be achieved within such systems without displacing, or
replacing an existing elite and without some change in values, and it
cannot occur independently of fundamental changes in socio-economic as
well as political relations. Of course, without a clear understanding of the
way men regulate their own access to political elites, the conditions which
govern that of women will remain obscure.
Observation suggests that there are two basic mechanisms which have
been used to regulate access to political power among men, providing both
a framework for competition and a means of setting bounds upon it. In
many traditional societies and those modern dictatorships which are
similarly characterised by the close unity of political, social and economic
status, the principal means used by elites to maintain their relative position
has been simply to exclude other men from competing altogether. This
exclusion of out-groups per se, or discrimination as it is nowadays
perceived, is a device which may come to be enshrined in convention and
law but from which the threat of physical coercion is rarely very far
removed. Historically it has taken such ‘constitutionalised’ forms as slavery;
qualifications such as birth, religion and property for political office; a
limited franchise and so on. Discrimination may also take more subtle,
cultural forms, such as the development of in-group and out-group

stereotypes which work informally on people’s expectations to qualify the
one and disqualify the other for access to convertible resources.
Discrimination may be open, or in the case of elites under severe pressure,
disguised by a semblance of equal opportunity; it may be conscious or take
the unwitting form of prejudice.
It is incontrovertible that outright exclusion has been the first line of
male defence against women, through sex qualifications for entry to
property ownership, education, occupations which are valued by men and
political rights. Under some systems of exclusion, such as the English,
women after marriage have even been denied any social existence by the
law. In some cases the restrictions on women’s access to resources can be
traced to remote historical times, while in others they have been a response
to the new conditions created by capitalism or have not been introduced
until women actively sought the entrée to new rights enjoyed by men.
While this kind of overt discrimination is still practised in many parts of
the world, it has had to be abandoned in recent times in advanced
societies, just as it has in respect of ethnic minorities and the poor, because
of its incompatibility with the ostensibly egalitarian values of modern men.
It would, however, be quite uncharacteristic of the behaviour of male elites
if more covert and informal, to say nothing of unconscious forms of
discrimination did not continue to be practised none the less, against
women as they are against men.
However, there is a second mechanism which is more characteristic of
advanced societies in modern times; it consists of institutionalised conflict,
through structures which convert socio-economic and other contingent
resources into political rewards in an open and regulated competition for
political power. Its development was necessitated by the advent of
capitalism, which wrought significant changes in the underlying conditions
of competition among men.
One of the major effects of capitalism was to create new resources which
led to the expansion and proliferation of elites and the relative dispersal of
social, economic and consequently political status. It became increasingly
difficult, and self-defeating, for traditional elites to practise outright
exclusion in the face of the rising expectations and socioeconomic
resources of newly emergent groups. Political systems were opened up, by
peaceable or violent means, to accommodate this wider social base of
competition but, in order to regulate the distribution of resources and
above all to prevent its becoming too general and egalitarian for their
liking, the incumbent elites and their competitors had recourse to such
protective mechanisms as differential systems of education; informal
patronage networks; exclusive professional, business and other
occupational associations; and the development of new political
institutions to regulate access to political power. It was particularly in
order to take advantage of the extension of the franchise that political

parties arose; institutions designed to harness the popular vote to the
pursuit of political office by competing elites.
Thus the basic features of contemporary political systems emerged,
including of course those elements of the recruitment process which are to
be found today not only in competitive party systems but to some degree
wherever their influence is felt:
1 self-selection;
2 what Prewitt described as institutional-selection, but might more
accurately be called external-selection (since individuals and informal
groups as well as institutions may act as agents of recruitment); and
3 voter-selection.33
On the face of it, all three pose distinct risks to both the continuity and
stability of political systems and the inter-related interests of existing elites.
If anyone can come forward, then why not the 'have nots'? And since the
relatively disadvantaged are always in the majority, the popular franchise
could be used to put them in power. The more open the competitive system,
the more opportunity too for challengers to the status quo to organise
themselves and impinge on the recruitment process through their own
institutions. The result could in theory be a rapid and revolutionary
redistribution of resources, with the formation of new in-group and out-
group identities or even, as some have hoped, the end of competition
altogether. In practice, however, political change in competitive systems
has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary and the complete
dispossession of elites is the exception rather than the rule.
The reason, of course, is that very same interdependence of
socio economic and political resources which underpins the whole history
of human political values, roles and practices and led to the opening up of
competition in the first place. Whatever the available forms of political
action may be, and whatever mix and balance of elements may be found in
the recruitment process, there is a basic tendency for those who act and
come forward to be ‘haves’ rather than ‘have nots’. At the lowest levels of
political activity, this tendency is so pronounced that Verba and Nie have
described it as the ‘standard model’ of participation.34 As far as political
elites are concerned, their tendency to be dominated by socio-economic
elites has been so inexorable as to call to mind the ‘iron law of oligarchy’
which was proposed by Michels, and it is not difficult to see why this
should be so. The very same attributes which identify people as members
of socio-economic elites—property, income, occupation and education—
are those which render people more likely to take part in politics. They also
give them what used to be described as ‘a stake in society’ and,
consequently, a sense that politics is relevant to their lives. On the other
hand, people who do not enjoy high status in their own or others’ eyes are
by the same token exposed to exactly those forces which will make it
difficult to participate at all, let alone seek entrée to elites: such factors as
their lack of the ‘civic orientations’ which flow from education and a sense
of one’s worth, the expectation that elite roles and the modes of political
thought and action which go with them will require people with superior
attributes to perform them correctly, and the fear that by putting
themselves forward they will be construed as challenging the status quo
and will be punished accordingly. In any case, the material conditions of
life which are necessary to take advantage of what Seligman has called the
‘political opportunity’ structure35—economic indepen-dence, control over
one’s time and appropriate funds—are a function of status too. This does
not mean that political recruits are necessarily always pursuing the narrow
interests of their dominant class (indeed, history shows that the sufferings
of the most deprived are sometimes introduced to the political agenda not
by their own kind, who are non-participant, but by people from the most
privileged sectors of society), but it does mean that where elite-based
institutions apply selection criteria which advance high status individuals
through the recruitment process, they are swimming with the tide.
Of course, where these institutions are concerned, it must be expected
that strong motives of self-preservation and political interest will reinforce
the self-selection bias. It is only logical for their selectors to prefer high
status candidates, for these are the people who exemplify the attributes
they value themselves and share their motivations. Neither their interests
nor the perspectives on which they draw will normally be served by
choosing people of a different kind to advance and represent them. Because
the kind of people they prefer will also be of the kind who mostly want to
be involved, this will seem both natural and inevitable, too. The only
tension within the recruitment process is likely to come from the fact that
parties have to attract a popular following among lowses groups in order
to win elections or maintain their legitimacy in a ‘popular’ dictatorship. In
practice the advent of mass-based democracies has given the parties a
crucial role in mediating between the tendency of self-selection and the
interests of the mass electorate. The standard outcome is the curious
balance that exists in most advanced societies, between the socio-economic
elite attributes of political leaders and the mildly redistributive content of
their policies.
Change does take place none the less, within competitive political systems
as well as by the revolutionary overthrow of traditional elites. This century
has seen major adjustments to the distribution of political power, and
consequently to the distribution of socio-economic resources through
political action; the rise of socialist parties in Western Europe and the
creation of the British welfare state are cases in point. These changes may
have been accepted by incumbent elites, but their source has lain outside
them, in the political advance of organised out-groups, and their

implementation has been associated with the advance into political elites of
individuals whose participation does not conform to the ‘standard model’.
That this has been possible at all is due, yet again, to the intrinsic nature of
capitalism. Instead of the socio-economic polarisation which many on both
sides of the nineteenth-century class conflict came to expect, capitalism in
most advanced societies led instead to a more complex stratification based
on two different kinds of socioeconomic resource.
The development of capitalism gave rise not only to new elites composed
of highly resourced individuals but to a new, collective kind of resource.
One of its effects was to concentrate workers in circumstances favourable
to the development of their political consciousness whilst providing them
with a weapon in its own dependency on the continuity of their labour.
Large social groups emerged, made up of individually powerless, low-
status men, who could none the less wield considerable collective power by
virtue of their strategic location in the capitalist economy and their essential
skills. Workers in large concerns, with sufficient money wages to support
unions and strikes and the self-confidence which went with the possession
of highly valued skills, were particularly well placed to take industrial and
political action; in trade unions and socialist or labour parties they found
the means to do so. Another collective resource, political this time, lay to
hand in the popular vote and though they had to compete with elite-based
parties for the support of low-ses voters, the fact that socialist parties were
derived from the working-class and identified with it in their programmes
helped them to reap the advantage that working-class votes were both
numerous and geographically concentrated and could thus be effectively
mobilised to win elections.
What then of the selection criteria of parties which originate in the
collective resources of low-ses groups? It is logical to expect that similar
motives to those of elite-based selectors will lead to a different socio-
economic tendency on the part of low-ses selectors within parties
committed to redistributive policies. The people they too can be expected
to value are those who exemplify the attributes from which their party
identity and strength derive. These will be people like themselves, to whom
the ethos and goals of the party are most familiar, comprehensible and
dear. In any case, to the extent that the overthrow of existing elites is one of
these goals, logic and the need for credibility suggest that there will be
electoral and psychological costs in choosing elite individuals as
candidates. The fact that the party is also modifying the standard model of
grass-roots participation by recruiting members from low-ses groups, means
that they will have an adequate pool of non-standard self-selectors on
which to draw.
It would be naïve, all the same, to imagine that the effect of such parties’
intervention will be to invert the standard model of participation where their
recruits are concerned. It is true that in the short term this might appear to
be the case. For example, the composition of the British House of
Commons changed quite markedly with the election of the first wave of
Labour MPs after the First World War; 70 per cent of them were workers,
and mostly manual.36 However, the working class is not a homogeneous
mass of equally skilled, equally valued and equally unionised individuals.
The collective resources on which its political movements are based are not
equally distributed and it is from the most-resourced sectors of this class
that the most powerful unions and the greatest levels of political
consciousness are derived. If labour movements tend to favour recruits who
exemplify their own most valued attributes, then from a middle-or upper-
class perspective these people may be indistinguishable from any other
workers, but they are actually most unlikely to come mainly from the least
collectively resourced sectors of the working class even if these least-skilled
and lowest-paid comprise the majority of that class.
Unfortunately, experience also suggests that once redistributive parties
have established their access to elite positions (which in the case of free
elections among mass electorates involves the entrenchment of partisan
rather than personality-oriented patterns of electoral behaviour) the effect
of such institutions tends to become blunted by the infiltration of the
standard model of recruitment within the parties themselves. Thus the
tendency of the Parliamentary Labour party in Britain has been to
‘converge’ in its socio-economic characteristics with its elite-based rival, the
Conservatives.37 A similar process can be observed within the
party organisation and the unions too, where time and organisational
elaboration have produced their own internal stratification and career
structures. In the Soviet Union, the elitist tendency of the CPSU since the
1930s, notwithstanding its claim to be the party of the working class, was
also well attested, of course.38 In both cases the revisionist effect of the
standard model has been most pronounced in higher-level elites. The long-
term tendency of such institutions is thus to modify, rather than invert, the
standard model and we can expect to find that even this effect is strongest
in the early period of their existence and thereafter at the lower levels of
the political hierarchy.
It is thus within a complex context of competition, resources and
recruitment among men, in which resources may be individual or
collective, the motivations of the parties conservative or redistributive and
the tendencies of recruitment either ‘standard’ or ‘modified’ that the
question of the gender pattern must be posed. It was only at the end of the
basic processes of change which gave rise to modern party systems that the
question of women’s access to political elites first seriously arose. The last
social group to achieve the vote and qualify for public office at all, they
entered the competitive arena only after the modern processes of elite
recruitment had taken shape and without the benefit of either socio-
economic resources or a physically concentrated female vote. Neither the

expectation that women’s entry to the public sphere would be followed
rapidly by their integration to political elites, nor the hope that they would
be among the principal beneficiaries of redistributive parties, has been
borne out. It is the relationship between these two variables—the out-group
status of women in the world of men, and their failure to penetrate
political elites—which must now be addressed.
WOMEN AND RECRUITMENT: THE ‘SCISSORS’

HYPOTHESES
The theoretical approach

That the key to the problem of the gender pattern lies in large part in the
socio-economic basis of male recruitment will become obvious, if we start
from the premise that (a) wherever women are seeking access to political
elites they are doing so through the medium of institutions created by men
and (b) whatever the attributes may be which are valued by men, women in
a male-dominated society are less likely to possess them. From this
foundation it is possible to develop precise hypotheses (which can be tested
empirically) about the way in which the effect of socio-economic resources
on the recruitment of men determines the outcome for women, and why
this outcome—the gender pattern—is always the same, irrespective of both
the political system which is involved and the selection criteria which are
being used.
It has not, of course, entirely escaped political scientists that there is a
relationship between socio-economic resources and the gender pattern in
elites. In Britain, Vallance has suggested that there is a connection between
women’s absence from political elites and the higher levels of other
hierarchies,39 She and others have pointed out that even high-ses women
lack the resource of occupations which particularly ‘converge’ with national
office among men. Similar observations have been made in the United
States, where Welch has attributed ‘a substantial part’ of women’s political
under-representation to their absence from the ‘eligible pool’ of business
and professional occupations40; Deber’s observation41 that the candidacies
of women are ‘targeted to lose’ and Merritt’s hypothesis that women
candidates will resemble male losers42 are also significant theoretical
advances.
However, all this progress has been made on a culture-specific basis and
within the conceptual framework of the standard model. When the
evidence does not fit, as in the case of the British Labour party, there is no
attempt to accommodate this theoretically. Instead, commentators who
have begun by ascribing women’s slow start in participation in general and
their problem of elite recruitment in elite-based parties in particular to their

lack of high, individual socio-economic resources either ignore the issue of
socialist or labour parties altogether or shift their ground, ascribing the
problem there to a lack of political resources instead. With the possible
exception of Hernes and Hanninen-Salmelin, who go to the heart of the
matter by observing the ‘systematic character’43 of socio-economic elite
representation (and women’s underrepresentation) in the corporate
structures of the Nordic countries and in passing suggest a parallel with the
composition of elected structures, the opportunity to integrate the gender
pattern findings in order to construct a general and comparative theory of
recruitment and resources is being lost.
The basis of such a theory must be that women as an out-group by
definition lack the attributes of status in all fields of social relations and in
particular the profiles of characteristics which the institutions of men are
designed to convert into political status, influence and power. Of course,
not all elite positions are equally attractive to all men, even among those
who seek political office. The resources which are relevant to any
particular contest will depend on the distribution of values in the male
catchment area for the office in question.
To the extent that maleness itself is a prerequisite for success, women’s
problem may be described as sex discrimination, and straightforward
discrimination by male gate-keepers against women seeking nomination to
winnable seats has been proposed by Rasmussen as a reason for the
low success rate of women candidates for elective office.44 Although he has
nothing but circumstantial evidence to present for this assertion and the
only systematic search for discriminatory attitudes (among Labour party
selectors) found none,45 the proposition that men (and women)
discriminate against women as such is difficult to disbelieve in a society
which values maleness more. Even so, sex discrimination can be only a
partial solution, for it cannot explain either the patterns of success and
failure among men or the fact that some women succeed in competition
with men. It is more to the point that the nature of male dominance
ensures that among the correlates of sex will also be the correlates of
success and failure among men.
Where there are winners, there must also be losers, and, in the perpetual
competition among themselves, the majority of men are losers. What
distinguishes these losing men is exactly what distinguishes women too—
their lack of the attributes of success among men. Where men and women
have the same attributes but men are more successful in the process of
selection, we may put this gender gap down to discrimination; where there
is a lack of women with the attributes of success among men, we do not
need this variable to explain the lower rates of either participation or
success among women.
Men, women and the standard model

Where men are competing for entry to a political elite, and it is the
standard model of recruitment which is operating among them, the
attributes in question are those of high socio-economic status. Losing men
will be distinguished by their relative lack of resources, low-ses men being
less likely either to come forward or to succeed when they do. Of course,
male elites compete among themselves and have their own internal
hierarchies, so that the competitors (and the attributes of success) will vary
according to the office in question; in politics as at the races, there are
‘horses for courses’. Only the careful and detailed comparison of winners
and losers in each case will show which resources are most relevant, and
which configuration most commonly associated with success.
As an out-group, women are by definition lacking in all aspects of status
compared with men. Since low-ses individuals are less likely than other
people to self-select, the first effect of this will be a smaller pool of potential
female candidates than male, even if women self-select at exactly the same
rate as comparable men. Indeed there is no need to look any further for an
explanation of the frequently observed fact that women ‘do not want to
come forward’. Given their socio-economic location, and applying the
same causal model to women’s participation as we do to men’s this is
exactly what we should predict. Most men do not want to come forward
either, but the minority who do come from clearly defined socio-economic
groups.
Women’s lack of resources will bite again at the point where external
selectors intervene. Even those women who do aspire will tend to have less
resources than high-ses men, so that even fewer will appeal to institutional
and other selectors, especially for winnable seats. In their lack of both
resources and success, women will resemble losing men. If only those
women were to stand whose resources were the equal of the most eligible
men, then the proportion of women candidates would be very small (if
indeed there were any at all). In practice, the proportion of women can be
expected to outstrip their possession of resources, producing the invariable
effect that women, in their lack of the relevant resources for success,
resemble losing men.
It might be asked, on the one hand, why will women compete when they
do not have the requisite resources to succeed, and, on the other, if it still
true anyway, given the spread of education, that women are seriously
disadvantaged compared to men. Of course the generic questions are, ‘Why
does anyone compete without the right resources?’ (for the majority of
losers are usually men) and ‘What is the relationship of education (in
distinction to the other constituents of socio-economic status), with
winning, as opposed to seeking, office? The first question cannot be fully
answered without answering the second question in the process.
To the question ‘Why do losers compete?’, one set of answers is

systemic. To win, one has to risk losing, and no one knows for certain who
will win until the final choice is made. Also, a competitive system needs
competitors, and this can generate pressure on relatively illendowed
individuals to take part. People who feel that it is ‘undemocratic’ for
someone to be elected unopposed may feel obliged to stand themselves in
order to maintain the system’s norms, even if they think they have no
chance of winning. Political parties, too, will put pressure on people to
stand in unwinnable seats rather than ‘lose their credibility’ by failing to put
up a candidate. In both cases, it is effectively a loser who is being recruited
(which is usually why conditions of candidate shortage arise in the first
place) and this will both make self-selection easier and relax the criteria
applied by external selectors. The tendency of education to produce a sense
of civic duty will make educated people particularly vulnerable to this kind
of pressure, even—or indeed especially—when they lack the other, more
crucial attributes of success and have ‘nothing to lose’ by being defeated.
However, the gender role of women (with its service orientation) and that
of men (with its fear of failure) may reinforce this effect for the former, and
inhibit it for the latter.46
Another reason is socio-economic change. The habits of mind which go
with status may outlive the decline of its material base and, conversely, the
rise of newly resourced groups may be impeded (and indeed disguised) by
the entrenched position of existing elites. In both cases, the key is a lack of
fit between the expectations of a group and the real opportunities its
members have for entry to political elites. In traditional societies, both
socio-economic change itself and the expectations of outgroups are severely
inhibited, but in a modern competitive system it is normal to find groups
with expectations which are not being met—and indeed may never be. One
of the main reasons for this is the spread of education—a potent source of
systematic mobilisation and disappointment which affects both sexes but
produces special effects in the case of women.
Education, as we know, is peculiarly associated with the development of
a disposition to take part in politics. However, it is only one of the
components of socio-economic status and historically not the most
important, as the analysis of capitalism (and the role of physical force and
landownership in the formation of earlier systems) makes very clear. Even
now, when access to an increasing number of occupations depends on
educational qualifications, education in itself does not determine status in
the way that property and occupation do. Access to the most valued forms
of education is mediated by the non-educational resources of parents and
even, in some cases, remote ancestors, and what is valued about it is often
the contacts it brings as much as the qualifications. Also, many of the
occupations which are most dependent on educational qualifications (like
teacher, researcher and scientist) are relatively low-paid and secondary to
the socioeconomic structures which they serve, structures which are often—
even typically—controlled and fought over by the relatively uneducated.
Education may enhance people’s wish to influence events, but often leads
instead to a frustrating mixture of job security and dependence, in a context
where it is property and other, more strategic occupations which determine
the basic structure of society and the major lines of social conflict. The result
is that modern societies contain fairly large groups of people whose
educational resources are sufficient to create high political expectations,
but too marginal to the most important dimensions of socio-economic
status (individual or collective) to be able to satisfy them at anything like
the rate they are created. In Britain, one consequence is the great post-war
increase in the number of people who stand for Parliament, most of them
representing minor parties. Since Parliament has stayed the same size, this
means there are far more losers than there used to be.47 Other effects, in
Britain as elsewhere, are the proliferation of pressure groups and a growing
input to the political agenda of issues (like environmental concerns) which
originate with intellectuals.48
For women, education is the most accessible component of
socio economic status, but is also more independent of the others than is the
case for men. The correlation of education with the other components of
personal socio-economic status (occupation, income and property) depends
on its practical exploitation. Although the combination of a high level of
education and a low-status job is one which few men encounter except in
times of high graduate unemployment, it is a commonplace for women,
whose working lives are fundamentally affected by motherhood. The very
expectation of motherhood discourages many women from ever practising
an occupation commensurate with their qualifications. Some give up paid
employment altogether after their children are born, becoming housewives,
while those who return to work outside the home are frequently obliged to
accept jobs of lower status and rewards than their level of education would
lead one to expect in the case of men.49 Thus the effect on personal status
of changes in the distribution of education is much more marginal where
women are concerned than is the case with men.
As far as politics is concerned, education may create the same initial
expectations among females as it does among males,50 but where the
occupations of men enhance their salience and promote their fulfilment
(albeit to varying degrees), women’s do not. A smaller proportion of
educated women than men will seek office, even though their numbers
grow in comparison with the uneducated generations that came before.
What is more, if virtually all the people who stand are educated, and
occupation, income or property is then the variable on which male winners
and losers divide, this will also be a point of difference between men and
women. Thus their access to education simultaneously gives women some
encouragement to aim for political status and fails to provide them with
the other resources needed for success.
Men, women and the modifying model

If a modifying model of recruitment is at work, (with its very different
criteria for selection) we must nevertheless expect the gender outcome to be
the same. Since it is the possession of collective resources, not the absence
of any resources at all, on which the identity and achievements of
modifying forces are based, it is inevitable that they will be male-oriented
in a male-dominated society. In the case of the working class, men have
made it their business to ensure this through the power of trade unions and
collaboration with employers. Though women were active in the early days
of the workers’ movement in most industrialising societies, by the end of the
nineteenth century unions everywhere were still dominated by men and
their values, as they remain to this day, even in the case of predominantly
female occupations. Far from attempting to combat the separation of home
and workplace developed by capitalism, the institu tions of working-class
men have used their influence on the whole to reinforce the marginalisation
of female labour and the socio-economic out-group status of women,
through such mechanisms as the ‘family wage’ of men, sex-segregated
employment, with low pay for women and male monopoly of skilled and
economically strategic occupations, protective legislation coupled with
higher rates of pay for the ‘overtime’ available only to men and so on.51
Of course, the political advance of the working class was accompanied
by internal competition and stratification not only between the sexes but
among men, with working-class women at the very bottom of the social
heap and highly skilled men in strategic locations at the top. The power
structure and achievements and, as we shall see, the elite recruitment
tendencies of labour-based parties reflect quite clearly the differential
resources of different sectors of their constituency.52 It is a modification,
not an inversion of the standard model of recruitment which they produce
and as in the case of elite-based parties women will be less likely to have
what it takes.
Lacking either the conventional, individual resources which are usually
associated with self-selection or the collective ones, based on occupation
and economic location, which have overcome this problem in the case of
many working-class men, low-ses women will be unable to generate
potential candidacies at anything like the rate of men. The most likely
outcome is that very few women will stand for redistributive parties and,
paradoxically, most of those who do will not be working-class. They will
be the female counterparts of the upper-class socialists and exworking-class
professionals to be found in larger numbers (but as a smaller proportion)
among the men. Where the modifying tendency is at its strongest (e.g. in
local politics), the success rate of these women will be low, compared to
low-ses candidates of either sex. Where the standard model has crept in,
their numbers, resources and success rate, as ever, will be small compared
to those of men.
The consequences of women’s out-group status are thus the same
whether the resources in question are individual or collective and whether
the tendency of selectors is to reinforce or modify the standard model of
the resources-recruitment relationship. They can be expressed in the form of
the following two hypotheses:
1 The socioeconomic characteristics of women seeking political office in

a male-dominated society will be different from those of men
and
2 The attributes of women candidates will resemble those of losing men.
In the context of a study of recruitment (where winners can be compared

with losers, and women with men) the demonstration of these
proposi tions should be perfectly straightforward—so long, that is, as the
different components of socio-economic status (and their varying
relationships with the recruitment process) can be clearly distinguished.
Where the standard model is at work, the proof will be that women
candidates, as a group, are less endowed with high individual
socioeconomic status than their male counterparts. Since it is this kind of
resource which is associated with success among men, relatively low ses, at
least in respect of its success-related aspects, will be the common factor
between women and losing men, compared to winning men.
Where modifying institutions are at work, recruiting and favouring the
candidacies of men who are low in individual ses but high in collective
resources, the differences between women and men will appear to turn the
‘standard model’ on its head. Because there is no modifying intervention on
behalf of low-ses women (who do not have access to collective resources),
the latter will be a missing element in the overall profile of women
candidates, compared to that of men; women will be almost entirely
dependent on high-ses—the standard model—to stimulate their
candidacies. The seemingly bizarre result will be that women (like the
losing men) will have higher, not lower ‘status’ than successful men. The
point is that this will not be status which is valued by selectors in the
particular context where they are competing.
The implications of these hypotheses for women’s recruitment are
obvious. If they hold good for both models of recruitment (standard and
modifying) and different political contexts, then the socio-economic
outgroup status of women is in itself a sufficient explanation for the
universality of the ‘iron laws’ which constitute the gender pattern of
recruitment, even where socialist parties are powerful and apparently
committed to women’s advance. As long as women’s access to political

elites depends upon the same process of recruitment as obtains for men,
but their attributes are those of losers, how can they succeed? Realistically,
their lack of resources must be expected to inhibit their advance on both
dimensions of the recruitment process—mobilisation and selection and
through the elements of both self and institutional selection. The
dominance of men can be sustained without recourse to sex-
discrimination, as opposed to socio-economic discrimination. All other
things being equal, until there are more women in society with the
attributes of successful men (i.e. until women cease to be a socio-economic
out-group), this situation cannot be expected to change.
PATTERNS OF SUCCESS AMONG WOMEN:

HYPOTHESES 3 AND 4
Ideally, the ultimate demonstration of the socio-economic explanation for
the gender pattern should be found in the patterns of success and failure
among women. The success rate of ‘winner-type’ women should
correspond to that of similar men, and women with the ‘wrong’ attributes
should be less successful than those with the ‘right’ ones. Sheer lack of
numbers, however, may make this proposition rather difficult to
demonstrate unless, or until women’s socio-economic profile becomes less
unlike that of men, and the number of their well-resourced candidates
begins to grow. In the extreme case, if there are no women candidates at
all who have the attributes of winning men, the predicted results obviously
will not be found; if they are very few, then we run into the problems
which arise in very small samples, where an insignificant deviation can
have a major effect on the results. It is also quite possible that the success
rate of ‘loser’ type women in a small candidate population will be higher
than it would within a larger group. Even among men there will always be
factors at work to ensure that not all winning men conform to the
dominant recruitment model—such contingencies as the idiosyncratic
effects of personality, the rise of protest parties, and byproducts of
electoral systems such as marginal seats and tactical voting. Into these
nooks and crannies of the recruitment process will penetrate men who look
like losers and yet succeed, and with them some women who, in the small
population of female winners, may well loom larger than their male
counterparts among the successful men.53
With these technical caveats in mind, it is therefore somewhat more
tentatively that the following two hypotheses are advanced:
3 Women with the attributes of winning men will be winners too

and
4 The socio-economic correlates of success and failure will be the same

among women as they are among men.
Thus far we have looked at the resources which women may bring to the
recruitment process from the standpoint of the male values on which it is
founded. From the very different perspective of the female gender role, with
its universal core of mothering responsibilities, it might still be argued that
women possess distinctive attributes, over and above their lack of socio-
economic resources, which derive from the peculiarities of their role and
might constitute potential political assets. Such characteristics as their well-
attested tendency to enter public life at a more mature and experienced
point in the life-cycle than men,54 their willingness to accept responsibility
and co-operation,55 and their expertise in somewhat specialised areas of
grass-roots political participation56 spring to mind.
The trouble is that the female gender role is not the standpoint from
which male-dominated political systems are constructed and operated.
Even if women candidates do possess distinct, gender-based characteristics
(which are not simply either the corollary of the male monopoly of valued
attributes or else an arithmetical illusion caused by the absence among
women of important categories which are found among men), the problem
is that these special characteristics are not valued in politics, for it is the male
gender role which is valued, not the female. Since there is no reason to
believe that women will be judged differently from men by selectors—
unless indeed the possession of characteristics which are distinctively
associated with an out-group actually militates against their chances by
accentuating their unvalued, out-group identity and the practical and
moral problems it presents to elite participation—we can only incorporate
this perspective on recruitment in the form of the following rather
depressing observation:
5 That any distinctive attributes of women candidates which are derived

from their gender role (over and above those which are simply the
corollary of their lack of the winning attributes among men) will be
neutral to their prospects of success, or even negatively associated with
it.
The sum of all these tendencies will be to create a ‘scissors’ problem for
women which accounts for the universal pattern of gender differences in
elite aspiration and success in male-dominated societies:
Whatever is associated with success among men, women will have

less of it—the first blade of the scissors. Whatever women have that
men do not will be of no use to them in competition with men—the
second blade.
Of course, this is not to say that male dominance is a perpetual and

impermeable condition of human existence, any more than the
relationships among men have remained fixed throughout their history.
Women would not be the first out-group to overcome, or at least modifiy
the entrenched position of an existing elite and there are some observers
who believe the dominance of men already is being eroded. However, we
should not attempt to make predictions about the outcome for women
until we are sure we understand the systems they are trying to penetrate.
How can women hope to avoid the pitfalls of unrealistic hopes and
disappointment which have characterised the last twenty years of the
women’s movement (or distinguish those strategies which may help to
shorten the odds against success) until they know precisely what the
obstacles are?
The first object of the present work is to improve this understanding. In
the preceding pages, a general theory has been presented which seeks to
explain the socio-economic basis of political elite recruitment among men
and the way this impinges upon women. In particular, this theory is
designed to account for the fact that the gender pattern is always the same,
not only where it is the standard model of recruitment which is at work
among men, but also where modifying forces (such as collective resources
and the redistributive institutions to which they often give rise) have
intervened to improve the chances of those who are low in individual socio-
economic status. If the propositions of this theory can be demonstrated
empirically, we will have come a long way towards an understanding of
what women are always up against. We will also have laid a proper
foundation for the analysis of their future prospects.
The focus of the following chapters is therefore on the hypotheses which
make up the first blade of the ‘scissors’. In Chapter 3, new data and old are
used to demonstrate the models of recruitment at work among men, and
their implications for women, in the comparative framework of partisan
recruitment in three very different political systems; the USA, Scotland and
the former USSR. In Chapter 4, it is the basis of nonpartisan recruitment,
with its greater emphasis in self-selection and the unmodified impact of
non-party, social institutions, which is examined, in the settings of the USA
and Scotland. Whereas the data used in Chapters 3 and 4 are drawn almost
entirely from local politics, Chapter 5 includes recruitment to the European
Parliament and the British House of Commons as well as local politics in
Scotland, and the point at issue is the possible role of minor or ‘third’
parties in causing deviations from the gender pattern and promoting
change.
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POLITICS, FEMINISM AND THE

Why do men always dominate political elites? If women want to change

London & New York

© 1993 Jennifer P. Chapman

ISBN 0-203-34448-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-01698-3 (Print Edition)

List of figures and tables vi

2.1 Occupational characteristics of the male population and of 49

2.1 Proportion of women nominated by parties, District elections of 41

2.10 Success rates (%) of Labour candidates by sex and 58

Three inter-related strands in my experience produced the impetus to write

pressure on the universities. I am also grateful to Tom Mackie for his

recruitment (and all three together as a single work); Chapter 8 as a critical

systems in which they are obliged to act. Reinforced by contemporary

identical study performed in different countries at a single point in time,

also required. It is impossible to analyse the situation and interests of

THE GENDER PATTERN IN ELITE RECRUITMENT

1 That wherever political rewards exist which are desirable to men,

The operation of the first of these contemporary laws is both

We thus have a universal gender pattern in political elite recruitment

THE LIMITATIONS OF EXISTING EXPLANATIONS

research has been on the centrality of socio-economic status in defining

men (and they frequently profess to do so) but somehow, mysteriously,

TOWARDS AN EXPLANATION OF THE GENDER

Soviet Union. Farm work is regarded as too physically demanding for

THE NATURE OF MALE-DOMINATED POLITICAL

to such disparate sources as Locke, Rousseau and Marx, is to defend and

cultural forms, such as the development of in-group and out-group

order to take advantage of the extension of the franchise that political

them, in the political advance of organised out-groups, and their

economic resources or a physically concentrated female vote. Neither the

WOMEN AND RECRUITMENT: THE ‘SCISSORS’

The theoretical approach

their problem of elite recruitment in elite-based parties in particular to their

Men, women and the standard model

To the question ‘Why do losers compete?’, one set of answers is

Men, women and the modifying model

1 The socioeconomic characteristics of women seeking political office in

In the context of a study of recruitment (where winners can be compared

committed to women’s advance. As long as women’s access to political

PATTERNS OF SUCCESS AMONG WOMEN:

3 Women with the attributes of winning men will be winners too

4 The socio-economic correlates of success and failure will be the same

5 That any distinctive attributes of women candidates which are derived

Whatever is associated with success among men, women will have

Of course, this is not to say that male dominance is a perpetual and

Dominelli, L. and Jonsdottir, G., ‘Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some

Grant, W. Pressure Groups, Politics and Democracy in Britain (London, Philip

Jewell, M. and Olson, D. American State Political Parties and Elections

Martin, J. and Roberts, C. Women and Employment: A Lifetime Perspective

Rich, A. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, (London

Skjeie, H. The Feminization of Power: Norway’s Political Experiment (1986-),

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