New research published in the American Political Science Review shows some dispiriting findings for girls’ engagement with politics. In “This One’s for the Boys: How Gendered Political Socialization Limits Girls’ Political Ambition and Interest,” authors Angela L. Bos, Jill S. Greenlee, Mirya R. Holman, Zoe M. Oxley, and J. Celeste Lay created and tested a new theoretical framework, “gendered political socialization,” to offer insights into how children perceive gender in politics. The authors find that “children not only perceive politics to be a male-dominated space, but with age, girls increasingly see political leadership as a ‘man’s world.’ Simultaneously, as children grow older, they internalize gendered expectations, which direct their interests toward professions that embody the gendered traits that fit with their own sex. One result of this mismatch between women and politics is that girls express lower levels of interest and ambition in politics than do boys.”

These findings, as discouraging as they may be, are not surprising. Prior research on how young girls, and all children, perceive leadership was a key motivation for the creation of CAWP’s Teach a Girl to Lead® (TAG), which is designed to disrupt these perceptions early through curricular support, activities, programming, and interaction with elected officials. Learn more about TAG – including resources from film, television, and literature that you can share with the children in your life – at tag.rutgers.edu.

Read the full article on gendered political socialization here, and get a behind-the-scenes perspective on their research from this interview with co-author Mirya L. Holman in The 19th.

In a new piece in Time magazine, Melinda French Gates writes about the importance of pursuing paid leave laws that include and empower all workers. Looking at the issue from the perspectives of workers, small business owners, corporations, and the broader American economy, she argues that paid leave benefits everyone individually and all of us collectively, and the issue is even more critical in the COVID era. “Since women bear the lion’s share of those caregiving responsibilities, it’s their careers that tend to suffer first and worst,” she writes. “Even before the pandemic made everything that’s hard about caregiving harder, one of the most frequent reasons women cited for leaving the workforce was ‘family responsibilities.’ This year, as COVID-19 wreaked havoc on schools, daycares and nursing homes, women’s workforce participation hit a 33-year low.” Read the full piece on the Time website.

Our Ready to Run® partners at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota have Ready to Run® events coming up for women looking to deepen their political engagement! Next week, on Friday October 8th, Ready to Run® Minnesota will kick of their virtual training series with “Every Year is the Year of the Woman” featuring speaker Rebecca Sive and will follow that with training events on engaging the media, fundraising, strategies for Black women, and running as a young woman. The series will run monthly through February. Learn more about the Ready to Run® Minnesota series here and stay up to date with all of our partner programs here.

Last week, the Women’s Media Center released a report about the five big Sunday morning political shows heading into the 2020 presidential election. Their report finds that “women and people of color are practically invisible — two-thirds of the guest appearances are by men and nearly three-quarters are White. White men comprise the overall majority of all guest appearances on these programs.” Read their full report on the Women’s Media Center website. And for more insight on how media biases shape political coverage, read our series of post-election reports and, in particular, view our recently-released interactive timeline of the 2020 presidential election sorted with the “Media Coverage” tag.

Our friends and Ready to Run® partners at the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University have announced the competition for the 2021 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics. The prize, which is designed to encourage and reward scholars embarking on significant research in the area of women and politics, includes a $2,000 cash award for each project selected. Honorable mention prizes of up to $1,000 per project may also be awarded. The Catt Prize is open to scholars of any level, from grad students to tenured faculty to independent researchers. Learn more and apply here.