 Good afternoon. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives this afternoon, whether you're here in the theater with us or joining us on YouTube or Facebook. Before we get started, I'd like to let you know about two other programs coming up in this theater on Thursday, June 6th at 7 p.m. We have a special film for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. The True Glory is the epic filmed record of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy and the Allied push across Europe. We'll screen a digitally restored version of the 1945 film created by our motion picture preservation lab. Former Senator, Secretary of Defense and Vietnam veteran Chuck Hagel will deliver our opening remarks. And on Thursday, June 13th at noon, author Tammy Vigil will be here to tell us about her new book, Moms and Chief, The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992 to 2016. She explores the function of spouses in recent political campaigns and scrutinizes how their portrayal has challenged or reinforced perceptions of the role of gender in American political life. Check our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives activities and programs. And another way to get more involved in the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports our education and outreach programs. Check out their website, archivesfoundation.org, to learn more about them. Today's discussion is part of a series of programs related to our recently opened exhibit, Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote. Rightfully Hers commemorates the centennial of the 19th Amendment and tells the story of women's struggles for voting rights as a critical step towards equal citizenship. The exhibit explores how American women across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, and class advance the cause of suffrage and follows the struggle for voting rights beyond 1920. Part of the exhibit looks at women not only using their votes but also running for office and taking a more public role in local, state, and national politics. As today's book, All Roads Lead to Power informs us, though, far more women found their way into politics through appointment rather than election. Before the 19th Amendment, women were active in public life, but after gaining the vote, women were able to more fully participate at many levels. So let's turn now to Caitlin Sodorsky to learn how and why women pursue and achieve political power. Caitlin Sodorsky is an assistant professor of politics at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. She has a PhD in MA in political science from Brown University and a BA in politics and law from Bryant University. Her work has appeared in the political research quarterly and the London School of Economics, American Politics and Policy blog. She has provided a television commentary on elections and political news for local ABC and NBC affiliates in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Caitlin Sodorsky. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction and for inviting me here to speak about my work, which I still love to this day. Sometimes you'll find that scholars after doing something for almost a decade are like, okay, I'm done. I never want to speak about this again, but I still love talking about my work and about the wonderful women who serve in political appointments and elected office at the state level. I wanted to give you an idea of where this project came from. It actually came from the 2012 presidential election. At that time, former Governor Mitt Romney, now Senator Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama were at a town hall debate, the second debate as part of the presidential campaign. And Candy Crawley, the moderator of that debate, asked them about equality, specifically about pay equality and what they would do about it. President Obama actually talked about the Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act. That was the first piece of legislation he ever signed into law. It was very important to him because his grandmother was a large part of his life and he remembered how hard she worked and how little she climbed the ladder in her work and how little she got paid in comparison to men. Governor Romney would turn around and say something else very different. He would talk about how when he first became governor of Massachusetts, he had a lot of appointments to fill. And when his staff handed him a list of those appointments, the vast majority of the people that they suggested were of course men. And he was not satisfied by this. He said, you know, you can't tell me these are the only people qualified. There has to be women who are qualified. And they turned around and said, well, these are the people who are qualified. So he said, okay, go back out and I want you to contact some women's organizations and, you know, increase your networks and find more women who could fill these appointments. And he turned around and he said during the actual debate and I quote, they went out to a number of women's groups and said, can you help us find us folks? And they brought us whole binders full of women. And of course, we kind of chuckle now and we certainly left them and a lot of late night hosts made some fun of him for saying this idea of whole binders full of women. But me as a PhD student in my, you know, figuring out what project I wanted to do for my dissertation, this rang a bell. I was like, wait a minute, we're talking about women in appointments in a way that maybe we hadn't thought of before. There were a lot of the research and scholarship and quite frankly, the news focuses on women in elected office. But what about these women in appointments? Who are the women on the quote unquote binders? Right? Who are those women? How did they get in the binder? Have they ever decided to put their name on the ballot instead of the binder? Or have they already done that before? And so I came to this research project curious as to how the appointment process worked as part of women's political trajectories. And there are a lot of prominent examples of women who have actually served in appointed office, either just purely appointed office or appointed office before they served in elected office. And one of them is actually Elizabeth Warren, a current senator from Massachusetts. She actually first got involved in politics and I really mean first got involved in politics prior to this. All she had ever done was vote and was a professor at Harvard Law. And she had got involved because she was an expert on bankruptcy. And someone she had went to school with who was a congressman person knew that she was an expert in bankruptcy and turned around and said, Hey, I think you'd be really great for this bankruptcy review commission, which is a federal level commission that was formed in 1997. And she really struggled with deciding on whether or not to join this position. She would say in her autobiography, I was deep in my research. And I thought the way I can make a difference was by writing books and doing more research about who was filing for bankruptcy and what had gone wrong in their lives. I didn't know anything about Washington, but the bits I picked up from the press made it sound pretty awful. She continues on in her autobiography to say that, you know, maybe she needed to think about the people she could help, right? So she struggled with, you know, maybe I don't want to do this for personal reasons for my own and putting myself out there. But there's a lot of people that she could help in helping to draft a legislation that would protect consumers, you know, from bankruptcy and filing bankruptcy. And so that's why she decided to and at the end of the day, accept the appointment. Unfortunately, things went kind of how she expected. It was a tough commission. In the end, the legislation that was passed really favored the banks more than it favored the consumers. And she kind of had her original beliefs upheld. Politics was not the nicest of places to work. So she went back to being a professor and being a researcher. And 10 years later gets another call this time from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to ask for her expertise again on some legislation, which then puts her on the radar of the Obama administration for the Consumer Financial Bureau, which she helps to establish, never gets appointed to direct because it's pretty clear that she won't get the appointment or accepted by Republicans on the Hill. And then a few years about a year or so later, she ends up leaving that when she's kind of done her work and comes up with running for elected office, something she's really uncomfortable with. She really, so far everything has met her expectations of what DC and politics are like. And she really is very hesitant to do so. But as we now know, of course, she decides to run for the United States Senate in her home state of Massachusetts and ends up winning. Yet most of what we know about Warren, of the story I just told, is the elected part. Most people don't know that she started in that bankruptcy review commission, which did very important work. And much of the commentary that we know about women in public office or public service is purely an elected one. And the ones that we listen to tell us that, yeah, some women serve, but they really don't serve at very high rates, right? And I'll go over those numbers in a second. So why do women not serve at high rates? And particularly when we're talking about public service, when we're talking about scholarship, when we're talking about the media, it's elected office, right? You know, we say public service, but we really mean women running. Which of course is very important. But that's not the only type of public service that is out there. And some of the reasons why it's easier to just talk about women running for elected office is because elections are regular events, right? They happen like clockwork. We know when they happen. Organizations follow these women to see how many women are running, where they're running, where they're winning. It's easy for regular people and citizens to kind of understand the stakes for elected office, right? You know, okay, if I run for Congress, I know what that kind of means, what they're doing. It's maybe not so clear what you might do in a political appointment. In addition, this kind of matches with the scholarship. So a lot of scholars are focusing on women in elected office. Again, for the ease in some ways of understanding the stakes, getting access to the data, and also being able to kind of convey the importance of women serving in elected office. So this means our narrative is almost entirely consumed by understanding women running for elected office and what they do in elected office. But my work tries to highlight the thousands of appointed positions across the United States. So my work focuses on the state level, but there is a ton of appointments at local level as well as the federal level. And we really don't know as much, particularly at the state and local level, about who's serving, how they got there, and what they kind of think about the political process. And it's not just like, oh, it's a thousand across the United States. It's literally hundreds of boards and commissions within each state. Some states have upwards of 300 or 400 boards and commissions that may have anywhere from five to 12 members serving on them. So then it really becomes important to know, OK, who's there? What are they doing and how do they get to those positions? They also cover all types of issues from education to regulation of the environment, of professions. So if you've gone to a doctor lately or a nurse or you've gotten your haircut by a barber or you've gone to the dentist and you've seen a dental hygienist, all those people are regulated at the state level by boards and commission members. They're deciding whether or not those people get to do their jobs, how they do their jobs, and whether or not, if let's say you had a bad experience with your dental hygienist, what disciplinary action may be taken. Finally, although I want to kind of push this idea that we should study appointed offices for their own sake, kind of maybe separate from elected office, it's also important to note that it could be that these offices are stepping stone for other kinds of offices, particularly elected office. So one study of state legislators found that 65% of the women state legislators that they studied started out in a appointed office, on a local board or state board or commission. So there is a connection there. So if we're wanting more women to serve in elected office, well maybe we should consider looking at women who are already serving in different ways, right, in ways that we hadn't conceived of before. So back in 2012 when I started this project, I really wanted to see what these numbers looked like. So in 2012 Congress was comprised of 16.8% women, 23.7% of state legislators were women, and only 12% of governors were women. So it's about six out of the 50 governors across the United States. And the only, the most recent data I could find about women in appointments was from 2007, which showed quite a bit of a gap, right. So now I was really starting to gain traction here, because I'm like, okay, here there's not many women serving in elected office. We know those numbers, but there are quite a few women serving in appointments. This study looked across all 50 states and looked at high appointees. So those are cabinet secretaries, cabinet undersecretaries, commissioners of departments, agency leaders, deputy agency leaders. Those are all the high appointees that are kind of covered when we're talking about what a high appointee does. And they were serving at pretty high levels, telling me that, well, maybe the narrative of what we understood about women don't want to get involved in politics was not 100% accurate, right. Maybe they were getting involved in politics, just in a way we hadn't considered before. As reference for now, right, we've seen jumps in the numbers of women serving in elected office, obviously Congress and the state legislature and governors have seen increases, particularly the Congress and the state legislatures have the highest number of women serving than ever before. So it really is this kind of historical moment in time for women's represent representation. But note that they still have not matched, right, the numbers of women serving in appointed office, right, from that 2007 study and my study, which will show about 40% of the appointees were women. So this therefore left me with this question as the basis of my study, which is how can we better understand women's pathways to political office at the state level and even the federal level through the study of appointed office. And more specifically, my book looks at three overarching but very much connected variables. First, recruitment to public office. How did these women get there? Did someone see them, know that they were an expert in something and email them or contact them? Or did they do something called self start? Did they kind of wake up one morning and go, I would really love to serve on this board or commission? Second, motivations, right, so it's one thing to be recruited, right? It's another thing to turn around and say, OK, but why do I want to serve? Particularly for the women in the high level appointments, I'm going to go over some of their stories. And a lot of them struggled with saying yes to saying, OK, I think I could do a lot as the deputy director of the Department of Natural Resources, but they still had that kind of tension with it being political and not liking politics. And then finally ambitions, where they're going. So recruitment is, you know, how they got there, motivations is why they got there. And ambitions are where they're going. You know, do they, do they just want to, is this like a one shot deal, right? Are they just serving on their board or commission or in their high appointment and will go back to private life? Or is this a stepping stone for them? Are they using this to kind of push them thought further up the career ladder of politics? So the way I did this was I asked them, I did a survey, I did something called the state political pathway survey across 20 states and four state level departments. And these departments were the health, commerce, natural resources and environment departments. It included all level of appointments. So if you were appointed in one of those departments across the 20 states, I was contacting you in some way, shape or form to ask you about your experiences. I also did follow up interviews with these individuals to get the context, right? So there's only so much I can get from a survey. But the follow up interviews, which were really amazing, really gave me some really good kind of the meat behind it all, you know, explaining to me, okay, yes, you said you were recruited on your survey. But what is that actually mean to you? What did the recruitment actually mean to you? And the survey is really one of the first of its kind, because earlier surveys and really the most recent surveys of appointees at the state level to this extent was from their early 1980s. But no one had ever really included those board and commission members, right? So when we study appointments typically in the women of politics field, it's almost always those high appointees, which of course are really important. And I wanted to include them and I wanted to understand their thoughts about their lives and their careers. But these boards and commissions are kind of like a no man's land. Like who's there? What are you doing? What are you, what are you thinking about politics? So that's why it's one of the first of its kind to include them. It also gives me a more holistic idea of the whole career ladder, right? You know, so if you started at a board commission, and at the end of the day end up in a high appointee later on in your career, now I can really see it. I can really see the full trajectory. And my survey found that 40% of the appointees were female. So a little bit higher than what had previously been found in 2007. Also found that it wasn't very diverse, unfortunately. So 92% of the appointees were white. And this is very similar to the numbers that that 2007 study had found. So we're really not moving very much forward in terms of racial diversity. They weren't young, right? So only 9% were between 20 and 40 years old. The majority were between 41 and 60, which kind of puts them, you know, kind of right in middle age, right in the middle of their career. But what was most intriguing about them was that typically when we looked at elected officials, women are older than men, right? So women elected officials are typically older than men. They typically are older because they want to raise their children first or wait until their children are a little bit older to run for elected office potentially, wanted to get some felt like they needed more experience than maybe men felt. And so typically elected female elected officials are older than men. It's the opposite of for appointees. Female appointees are actually younger by a couple of years than their male counterparts, which raises some questions on whether or not that maybe this is a more female friendly kind of area to go into, right, that you can have a family or you could be young and still, you know, kind of serve your serve your state or your community in some way. They had incredibly high socio economic statuses. So over 70% had family incomes over 100,000. Over 62% had completed graduate school. These were highly educated individuals, lawyers, doctors, people who had PhDs, individuals who had MBAs, you know, psychiatrists, sociologists very highly educated and the women were slightly more educated than men. This may be slightly related to the statutory requirements for some of these appointments. So for example, you know, if we're looking at an accountants board, well, you need a CPA, right? You need people who have certain levels of education by law to be on that board or commission or a nurse's board, right? They'll want a school nurse. They'll want someone who works in a hospital, but then they'll also want someone who has a PhD in nursing to represent that segment of the nursing world. So some of it might be driven because of these statutory requirements. Because appointees are so infrequently focused upon, I figured it might be helpful to just generally go over what it is they might actually do, right? So starting with the high appointees. So of course, a lot of this is highly unique to where they're serving, right? So for example, a natural resources department female appointee was responsible for the trust lands in her state which were tied to education funds. Another female appointee from the Health Department was the leader of statewide initiatives and priorities. We're kind of kind of setting the direction for the health department in her state. A woman from the Commerce Department was in charge of human resources and restructuring the department and making sure things kind of moved smoothly. So in general, we know that appointees, high appointees have certain common duties. So they supervise people, of course. So that first appointee was in charge of about 105 people, the health appointee, about 300, and the commerce appointee about 50, right? And so there's kind of a wide range in how many people they're actually supervising are in charge of. They're setting the direction of the agency, right? Of course, they don't have just a total free reign because they have a governor, right, or someone maybe above them who's telling them, you know, somewhat what we're doing here. But they have, you know, other kind of abilities to set, okay, what priorities are we going to set? They're of course going to report to the governor, right? So if the governor is dealing with a certain legislation, or wants to consider maybe an executive order somewhere in within their kind of policy realm, they're going to be talking to that governor about, you know, their background and you know, what needs to happen and what expertise they're getting from the people within their department. And of course, what all bureaucrats do and what at the end of the day is probably most important is implementing the laws, right? So writing the regulations, making sure that the legislative process and the bureaucratic process are moving smoothly and are moving together. Probably a little less and well known are Board and Commission members, right? So there are three different types of Board and Commissions, which I cover all in the book. The first are boards and commissions that are advisory. So the one I have up here is the Illinois advisory board for persons who are deafblind. This board provides advice to the state superintendent of education, the governor and the general assembly on all matters of policy relating to persons who are deaf or blind or deaf and blind, including the implementation of legislation on their behalf. So they're not going to be able to stop legislation, right? Or say this must pass. But they're going to be kind of the expertise on anything dealing with people within their community. So people who typically serve on this type of board or commission are those who are deaf and blind, probably people from the education world, people from the medical field, as well as parents of children who are deaf or blind, and typically also someone from older generations to represent those who are deafblind who may be 60 and over, 70 and over. That's typically the type of people who serve on these boards. Other types of advisory boards and commissions are typically involving medical areas, right? So there's like a traumatic brain council, right? Their advisory or a board relating to autism, right? And trying to understand autism and advising the governor and the legislature on autism and the best practices for that. And I don't want to discount advisory boards because sometimes I think people say to themselves, well, they don't have a lot of power. Well, I think they do. I think they have a lot of power for a couple of reasons. One, they have power because it signals from the state to the public what they think is important, right? So if a women's council, for example, exists in one state but doesn't exist in another, that might signal what that state feels about women's public policy. Second, you know, these are the people who have the expertise, right? You know, they're the ones who've got the ear of the governor or the legislature, of course, if they're listened to. The second type of board and commission are regulatory boards and commissions. So an example is the Illinois real estate administration and disciplinary board from their Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. And this is responsible for the licensing of real estate agents in their state. And this means they handle any disciplinary action that needs to be taken as well as setting the requirements for obtaining a real estate license within their state. These are incredibly common boards that will regulate anything from nursing, nurses to plumbers to doctors to accountants. I mean, pretty much any profession you can think of, these are the people who are kind of making the decisions on who can be within their profession and what happens if they do something against the rules in their profession. Finally, there's policymaking boards. And these can be very, very powerful, like state boards of education. The one I have up here is the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission. It's a policymaking board that has the power to protect and set the policy for the land within the Illinois Nature Preserves System. This commission has the authority to protect lands within the Nature Preserves System and preserve the land by overseeing a staff of biologists. No lands under the Nature Preserves System can be taken under the power of eminent domain without this commission. They have to give approval along with the governor and other invested public owners. So these are people who are very powerful and in a lot of ways, maybe even more visible than those on regulatory or advisory boards and commissions. As I mentioned before, I focus on three areas of appointees' careers when trying to understand women's pathways to power. And the first one is the recruitment aspect of this. One of the appointees that I surveyed and then did a follow-up interview was a woman named, or I named her. I had to change her names because it was anonymous, Madison Williams. She was a Commerce Commissioner, high appointee, and had absolutely no background in politics. So she was kind of like Elizabeth Warren in the late 90s having had no background in politics. When asked how she came to be appointed to her positions, she said, from what I understand is a lot of different people put in my name. So folks from the historic preservation world, the environmental world, legislators put my name forward. And I don't know the inner workings, but they called me in. There was a group of four or five people that interviewed me just saying that they were interviewing people and they weren't really sure for which position at that point. At some point, they called and said they wanted me to come and work for the organization. So as her quote shows, she was recruited. She didn't seek out this position on her own. Someone, people knew her from kind of the private industry side of her profession and said, hey, I think you would be a great fit for this. And recruitment matters a lot in politics because research has shown that women are a lot less likely to think about these things themselves. So they're a lot less likely to kind of wake up one morning and go, I want to run for the legislature, or I want to serve on a board and commission. They just don't think about it in the same ways that men do. That means that you need people in power to say, hey, you would be great. You would be a great fit for this role, for this public service. And typically, it's not even just once. Even more recent research has shown that you need to ask women multiple times and say, hey, I really think you'd be great. Hey, I really think you'd be great for this position. But we have no idea what happens in the recruitment world for appointed positions. We know quite a bit about recruitment for elected office and who's doing it. So like party officials, other elected officials, people who are a part of certain organizations. We know about recruitment for elected office. But we don't really know as much about recruitment for women in appointed office, which is a shame because this might be the major way that they get in the door if they're less likely to be self-starters like women in elected office. So as I mentioned, all studies have pretty much looked at recruitment for elected office. And I'm able to show recruitment for appointed office. So on the left-hand side, you'll see the percentages of the women I surveyed who had been recruited for appointed office versus on the right-hand side, those have been recruited for elected office. Note that a lot of these, you know, almost half of the women got to their appointment by recruitment, right? Which means that recruitment is something that is happening in the appointment world. Second, note that they're much more likely to be recruited for appointed office than they are for elected office. This means there are many men and women out there who are being asked to publicly serve for appointments but not so much for elected office, which is a shame because, as I mentioned before, these are highly educated individuals who could provide a lot of expertise, right, for elected positions. And they're being overlooked in some way, shape, or form. When we look more closely at recruitment, we can see gender differences more clearly. So appointed men were more likely to be recruited by elected officials, appointed officials, party officials, and members of governor's staff. The only kind of group that I found that women appointees were more likely to be recruited for were women's organizations, which is not terribly surprising because that's kind of what their job is. Men were also more likely to be recruited to both offices, right? So they kind of beat out women in terms of recruitment for appointed office specifically or recruitment for elected office specifically. There was one category of women who, of appointed women, who was most likely to be recruited. And that was women in high-level positions, right? So those high appointees that I had talked about before, they were actually the most likely grouped to be recruited for elected or appointed office. This is really interesting because I think it suggests just how high women need to go in public service before they're actually tapped on the shoulder and considered for other types of positions, right? So you have to be a pretty high-level state official before other recruiters take you seriously enough potentially to consider you for other types of offices, whereas men in low boards and commissions, for example, are more likely to be recruited than women in low boards and commissions, maybe because that service is taken more seriously than the women's service. But even if women are recruited to public office, which they are in some way, shape, or form, this doesn't reveal why they said yes, right? And why they actually decided to serve. So Susan Richards is a high appointee who I interviewed in an aging agency who was very clear about her interest and disinterest in politics. She would tell me, and I quote, this is the first time I've ever really been involved in politics. I have no affiliation, have had no affiliation in any party, have not run any campaigns, have not been involved in any campaigns. When she was approached by the governor's chief strategy officer for the appointment, she really struggled with the decision. She said, so really, the only reason, it took me just to be honest, a good month probably to make a decision, mostly because I haven't had any aspirations to be in office, to be in state government even, to be honest. But I do have a passion for aging. And I thought that as, ultimately, as a good opportunity to really impact policies, funding, and other such things for aging programs and services. And when I asked her more about this passion for aging, it came from her own personal life. She was very close with her grandparents and had a front row seat to the aging process and how they were treated by other people and by the medical community. And this pushed her to then go get a master's in public administration with a focus on aging policy that then led her into the nonprofit world that then put her on the radar for this appointment. And Richards exemplifies many of these women appointees across the United States. They have a passion for something, a disease that affects their family, the profession that they've dedicated their lives to. And it is only because the appointment specifically related to this that they took the plunge, that they said, OK, I'll do it, even though they still struggled over it. In fact, when we look more closely at some of the reasons why these women said that they wanted to run for appointed or seek out the appointed officer, accept the appointed office, we can see that dedication to a policy area is one of the highest reasons why they do so. More than three quarters of appointed women, whether they were low-level or high-level, served in their appointment because of an interest in a policy. High-appointed women like Richards and Madison Williams took their appointment because of career advancement. So here, there's a really interesting blending of both the private sector, career ladder, and the public sector, career ladder, that really they can support each other, and you can go back and forth between the private and the public sector and still be moving up the career ladder. Finally, there's a really interesting split between low and high appointees in terms of taking or seeking their appointment because of an interest in state government. Very few low-level appointees took their positions because they liked or were interested in state government. So there seems to be a somewhat split between the levels of appointment and why women get involved in the appointment world and as I'll reiterate for the rest of this, it is typically not because they like politics. In fact, not liking politics is typically what keeps them out of politics in the way that we typically consider it, which is more electoral. This lack of interest or connection to politics raises questions of appointees' ambitions for future office because this kind of ambition can be for appointed, elected, or both. And my study finds that the women who are most ambitious for higher public office are younger appointees, appointed women with children over 18, appointees who have been recruited, right? They were asked, right? Hey, I think you'll be good for this position. Appointees who are personally encouraged, meaning that maybe a co-worker or a spouse or another family member or friend said, hey, I think you would be great giving back to your state or your community or your country. You should consider an appointment or an elected office. They were more likely to be personally encouraged. And most interestingly was that appointed women with higher self-qualification scores were less ambitious for public office. So what does this mean? Well, to give you a bit of a background, there's quite a bit of research that shows how women feel about their experiences, right? So how women feel about having served on a board or commission or having had 10 years' experience as a public health official or in a nonprofit? And this research has shown that women typically are a lot harder on themselves when it comes to kind of evaluating their qualifications to run for an elected position than men are. So you can have a man and a woman who have the same exact background, have the same exact experiences, who have the same exact characteristics even. And the man will say, oh, yeah, I'm qualified to run. And a woman would say, she's not. And so I expected that the appointees, like women in the general public, if they felt confident about their qualifications, that they would be more ambitious to run or to seek out elected or appointed office. But it's actually the opposite. Appointees who think that they have good qualifications like, yeah, I have qualifications to run for elected office or seek a higher office, they're actually less ambitious than others. And when we look at the appointees running for office, we see that 18% of the appointees in my sample had run for elected office, and there's a clear gender split, right? So more men, male appointees, said they had run for elected office than female appointees. Slightly smaller of a gap in terms of those who actually held, right? And that kind of holds true. Women, if they run, they typically are successful in winning. And so this therefore raises two questions. Why are women less ambitious for higher office than men because they are? And why are these women who are confident in their abilities, right? Why are they less ambitious than similarly situated men? Well, going back to what the appointees said themselves, I think we get a couple of answers. So the first is that there's a clear distinction between what one does as an appointee and what one does in either local or federal levels of government. So Lillian Fox was a commissioner, a high appointee of a state department of health, and she made it clear that there was a certain lifestyle associated with federal service that she was just not interested in. She would say, I have had some F offers on the federal level and I've turned them down because I don't want to leave my home. And so for personal reasons, I have decided that I have a lot of colleagues that have relocated to DC and or travel there, work during the week and travel home on the weekends, but I'm just not willing to have that kind of lifestyle. For Elizabeth Goldman, a deputy director in a natural resources department, she said it would take a very special kind of federal appointment for her to consider it. Right now, I'm number two or three in the department of natural resources at the state level. Would I consider doing that at the federal level? Yes, if I believed in the philosophies of the administration, if I felt that person was consistent with my beliefs and I wasn't selling out, then I would do that. This Board and Commission member would say, I am not involved in politics. She was very emphatic about this and seemed kind of shocked that I wanted to speak to her at all. I was appointed as a public service as a public representative to the board of a company that uses some public money. So a lot of state money goes into that company every year and they need a public representative. That's my only involvement. Here we see a second pattern emerge. A distancing of female appointees from politics. You know, that what they did was not politics, it was something else. Even though they were appointed by a government or by a governor or by someone high up in an administration, and they were dealing with state regulations or state laws and state money, right? So here, this one was dealing with state money specifically and she was emphatic that what she did was not political, was not involving politics. When I dug a little bit deeper into her background, she became very interesting because she was actually a lot more political than she wanted to admit. When I asked how she got to her appointment, kind of got on the radar for this, she mentioned that someone had asked her through who she knew through her community activities. And when I asked her what those community activities were, they included her being the chairwoman of a task force to assess problems that a proposed road was going to cause for her community. Again, a community problem, but also a political problem, right? This was a new kind of interstate that they wanted to build and her community wasn't very happy about it and she wasn't happy about it. So they kind of formed a group to try and stop this and see what they could do. She even struggled with saying she wasn't political when she spoke with me, right? She would say, and I quote, when I asked who was on this task force, she said, yeah, different representatives. We have a lot of political groups in this area, not political, I guess, public interest groups. We live in a gorgeous part of the country and it's also part of the state where people want to settle so there's an endless battle between the development and preservation and that's the main fight I stay in. So even in the interview itself, she said, because that was the easiest word to grasp because that's really what it was was about political groups and her political group but then she kind of went back to say, oh no, no, no, but it's not really political. We're not really that involved in politics. This appointee had clearly been involved in the political process at the local and the state level but she was doing something that scholars call disavowing politics as a way to say that she was involved, right? Because politics is where bad things happen. That's partisan, that's nasty and I can do things outside of politics that are much better even though from my standpoint as a scholar, it is politics. It is a political body. This disavowal of politics was incredibly strong among high and low appointees. One appointee would say, I guess I was going to ask you your definition of what political is in the sense that they have the ability to make changes in things if you consider that political, yes, if you consider them political in the sense of them being liberal or conservative or that, I don't know. An appointee on a water planning advisory committee said, I am not an elected official. I'm on the water planning council advisory committee. The warning planning council is made up of staff itself and the water planning council is advisory. It is not political either. And finally, an appointee on an engineers and land surveyors regulatory board said, because it is comprised of engineers and land surveyors and we tend to view the world to be less influenced by politics than by personal and societal ethics and competence and so I wouldn't consider an engineering board to be political. Although the appointments have come from the governors, so this was another kind of tension of them going, well, I guess I was appointed by a political body but I don't want to kind of admit that it's political. And so you can see for these appointees, politics was something very specific. For the first one, it was about partisanship, whether or not you were a Democrat or Republican. For the second one, it was about whether you were elected official. If you weren't elected official, then you were political, if you weren't, then you were not. And this last one, which I found really interesting, if you were ethical, then you were not political, was pretty much what she was saying at the end of the day. We must also remember that many of these women, particularly in high state appointments, have a front row seat to how elected office works. They work with the legislature on a daily basis. They work with the governor on a daily basis. So they know how elected office functions and they were not impressed. Riley Cunningham, a high appointee in a natural resources department, would say, I've worked with the entire legislature in my current position, state legislature, and I've worked with our congressional delegation offices both in my past work with the city as well as with the past work with the state. And this work, and frankly, I've never found it very appealing as a career. She would go on to say, I was going to say, if people approached me for elected office, I probably wouldn't. If somebody approached me from the president's office, whoever that might be, and said you would be peace corps directors of the world, I definitely, I would take that. But that's not an elected position. That's an appointed position. Or somebody said, would you like to be ambassador to France? I would take that on. But in terms of actually running for office, no, I have no interest in that. So here we're seeing a very clear distinction for many of these women appointees between the appointed world and the elected world. And a lot of the reasons why they're not running or not interested in running is because of the political partisan nature of what they perceive elected office to be like. And when we take a look at the data for admission for elected office specifically, we can see that first off, appointees in general are not interested in elected office, right? So these are very high numbers on the right side of the graph showing that they're just not interested in seeking out elected office very much. But there's also a seven point gap between the male and female appointees and ambition for elected office between the categories, which is backing up the evidence that appointed women think differently about appointed versus elected office and whether or not they would ever seek it out. I don't want you to think that these appointed women are all uninterested, right? Or never going to seek elected office or never gonna run are not ambitious because there were some appointees, female appointees who were ambitious for other appointed office or for elected office. Donna Abramson, a board and commission member said, I've always wanted to run for office ever since I can remember, but there are things in my life that led me to believe I wasn't ready. If that's true or not, I'm not sure, but I wanted to get my kids raised first and I wanted to be financially stable and have some community experience before I ran. And I know those aren't requirements per se, but I just felt like it would make me a better official. So that's what I decided to do. So on the one hand, he's a great example of a female appointee who got involved because she liked politics. She wanted to be in politics. But I also think she's a great example of why so many women wait, right? Why those elected official women are older than men because even though she acknowledges that I don't need any of these qualifications to go and run, I can run today, she feels like she needs it, right? So she's holding herself to a higher standard. So when I began this project, I wanted to better understand women's pathways to power. The story of women's pathways to power, as I had mentioned in the beginning, has been almost an entirely electoral one. This is problematic because it means we are ignoring thousands of women and men across the United States who are dedicating their time and their expertise and their energy, often with very little to no compensation. So a lot of these Board and Commission members get nothing for their service. I mean, maybe they'll get reimbursed if they have to travel a certain distance, but that would be about it. Two incredibly important areas of state government. This in general points to a larger problem of ignoring and therefore not understanding what boards and commissions do for our states. This is problematic for accountability because if we're not liking how a profession is run, well, where do we even know where to go if we don't know that the Board or commission that regulates them exists? And it's also problematic for issues of representation, right? Yes, these boards and commissions require certain types of representation from certain fields, right? So of course we want accountants on accounting boards, but we also probably want women and African-Americans and Latinos, right? And young people and old people, we want everyone kind of to be represented because a nurse who's just come out of their program and is starting fresh probably has a different perspective of the nursing field than someone who's been in the field for 30 years. And they're both equally important, right? They both should be there on that Board or commission, but who knows if they're actually serving because we don't actually ever ask and we don't actually ever look. More specifically, these women appointees, from these appointees, we've learned the following. They're less likely to be recruited. They're less ambitious. They hold much more negative feelings about politics and the political process. And they have a very unique definition of public service. This matters because the stories that we have been telling ourselves, right? As scholars or as citizens, is that women don't publicly serve at as high rates as men. But really that story is an electoral one. It's not really an appointed one. Women are serving in state appointments. They're serving in relatively high numbers, still not gender parity, but they're serving in relatively high numbers. And these are where important state decisions are made. This also matters because my story gives women back their agency a little bit. A lot of the rhetoric on women's ambition is that they're victims of socialization. So when they're growing up, people telling them that, oh, you can't run for elected office or women aren't aggressive and don't do those types of things. And that they lack confidence in their abilities. I challenge this rhetoric to show that there are real and valid reasons why women don't pursue elected office. They may still view themselves as unqualified. I'm not saying that that may not be a part of the story. But that's not the only reason they're uninterested. They're uninterested because they see a process that's not that great. They see something that they feel in some ways is gender biased, right? That running for office is much harder for women, whether that's fundraising or just the process itself. And that turns them off. They're turned off by a very negative and polarized process that they feel they just can't get much done. That they can get a lot more done in their appointment, whether that's high or low, than they can if they were to run for the state legislature. Well, we can do about this as a toll order, right? As a society is to try to promote more positive perspectives of what politics is and what politicians can do. Of course, this is really hard to do when things are so negative and things are so partisan. What I think is more manageable and still important is helping women to see the connections between their personal and professional lives and public service. This was the driving force why women got involved. Why they finally said, okay, I'll serve in state government even though I don't like politics, even though I'm not gonna be political while doing it. I'll serve because this helps my career because this is something I really believe in and I'm truly passionate about. Taking these women's experiences into consideration is vitally important if we wanna understand how women access political power and really get the full spectrum of that power and not just an electoral one. It's also important to try and understand why women take specific pathways to access that power at the state level and why they don't. So I hope that you can consider, right, when next time you go to your barber or your hairdresser or you consider some type of regulation that's happened in your state, where it came from, who it came from. And I think partly what I love so much about this work is that I can help people understand that there's a lot of opportunities out there if you ever wanna take it up, right? If you ever wanna serve at the local or state level on a boarding commission. That oftentimes doesn't require a huge time commitment but really makes a difference in terms of our safety, in terms of our health, in terms of our regulation, and in terms of our policies. So hopefully I can convince you to maybe seek out something in the future for an appointed office to at least understand how the process works and who is actually representing you on those boards and commissions. Thank you. So I believe we're at the question-answer portion and there are microphones on either side of the stairway and I'd be happy to take your questions. Thank you, that gave me many things I hadn't thought about. When I think about the last 25 years or so, when there's been surges in the number of women in the US Congress in 1992 and just recently, it's often because there's been an outrage from women about what they'd seen. So in other words, rather than be disgusted, well, they are, they're so disgusted that they say we're going to make a difference. I'm wondering to what extent you've found that there was seeing a path where other women had come forward that played into, for example, more women on the national scene, more women and things like that, to what extent that incentivized women to get into the process? It's just a great question. So I think first I would say that, going into my next project, that this is something I'll capture, I think, on my next iteration of studying Board and Commission members. Because this happened in 2012, I don't think I was really capturing that mood as much because thinking back to all of what people said in terms of their reasons why men and women for serving, I don't remember any of them saying that I'm doing this because I'm so unhappy with the political process or other women have served before me and that's why I want to do it. I don't remember any of that kind of rhetoric coming through in the interviews or in the qualitative part of the survey. But I think now you might find something a bit different potentially at the high appointee level for why they kind of say, okay, I'm going to take the plunge and do it, that might be a reason. I'm not so certain about Board and Commissions because still a lot of people just don't know about them. So yeah, that would be an interesting power to see nowadays. Yes? Hi, I'm Caitlin, also I spoke the same way too. Awesome, so few people do it that way. I'm just curious what you're doing next, what you're researching. I know there's a lot of organizations that try to change a lot of ways that women view themselves. I work with AAUW and they do salary negotiations to help build women's confidence. So I'm just curious what you're doing. Sure, so the next iteration of this project is doing a deep dive into about four states. So this project only looked across four departments. I'm planning on covering literally every Board and Commission appointee that I can across four states and I'll regret that probably in about six months from now. So to try and understand a little bit deeper, these individuals, what they're doing but then also the second part of that project is looking into the work they're actually doing on the Boards and Commissions and hopefully sitting in on the meetings, most of which are public, so you can go and see Board and Commission meetings if you'd like and seeing how those interactions are gendered. So it's great to see that 40% of women on Boards and Commission members are women but how are they being treated by male appointees? Are they listened to in the same ways? Are they supporting each other when supporting each other in these appointments? So that's kind of the next iteration of this project. Thank you. Hi, I was wondering if you considered citizen review Boards like for police forces, CASA, that kind of thing. Those are voluntary but what I was thinking is that that's kind of a time management issue that people do it when they have time for these things. So maybe women who are deeply into their careers don't feel like they can take the time to be appointed or volunteers. So I think this is particularly an issue I've heard at the local level that a lot of these local Boards and Commissions set times for meetings that are not very women friendly. My friendly to particularly women who have young children or children and can't make those Board and Commission meetings. So I think this is something that is the next iteration of the project is to look at how women friendly these Boards and Commissions are and I wouldn't be surprised if, in fact, I expect that certain areas within police, within fire departments, within transportation, those are very male dominated fields that A, you'll find much less women serving but B, that might be done because of the way that they meet and how those meetings are set up. So I think that that's the next stage. First of all, thank you so much for this data and info. It's fabulous. So I'm from Orange County, California and we are just beginning a project. It's called our Blue Bench Project which gives you a clue where I'm cited. But trying to do the recruitment and one of the components that we wanna build into this and I'm curious if any of the women that you spoke with talked about this part of it and that is taking some responsibility once they're elected, once they're appointed for mentoring and helping to lift up either younger women or women who are new to the process because it seems to me that women like to, we like to misery loves company, we like to talk about stuff and having these kinds of people have already been through that, share their stories and experience and guide folks. So I don't know if you talked about that. Yeah, so I don't really talk about it much here but one chapter of my book is dedicated to the elected survey side. I did survey elected officials to kind of give a comparison between the two groups and that's where I saw them entering come through. One woman elected official, she was a state senator, said that she was kind of very interesting because she was very similar to the appointees as they were like now, how they felt about politics and then someone finally really pushed her and said, just do it, just try it and she said she ran and kept on saying to party leaders, well, if you find someone else in this process because I don't wanna do this and then fell in love with it, fell in love with being elected official and she spoke about how she thought it was very important and she works very hard to reach out to women that she thinks would be great candidates for elected office and to try to undo, write some of this thinking that they can't do it, right? So that's the side that I saw. Hi, my name is Taylor Spreben. I'm an undergrad studying political science and philosophy at North Dakota State University, so in Fargo. North Dakota was one of the states I included and they have an amazing state government website. Thank you, North Dakota for having a great and easy navigate to easy navigate. Okay, that's good to hear. This past November, I actually conducted an exit poll research on how gender attitudes affect vote choice and one of the statistically significant variables was party identification. I was just curious if you had noticed like a trend in some of the women that you had interviewed if they were more liberal or more conservative or how like party identification affects like the women that are running for office or were appointees. So women in general and the women appointees were more likely to be identified as Democrat or leaning Democrat but there was still a good portion of women who identify as conservative Republican but I think what's most fascinating about the party identification was that it was on a seven point scale from like very conservative or it's too strongly Republican or strongly Democratic and when you look at that chart for elected officials, it's very high at the ends. So almost all the elected officials identified with the parties and very few identified as independents in the middle but the appointees across the board, women and men were much more evenly distributed. So there were a lot more appointees who said that they were independent or maybe independent leaning slightly one way or the other which I thought was fascinating because I think it kind of hints that maybe the polarization hadn't seeped into the bureaucracy in the same ways that it had seeped into elected office. So that was kind of the most interesting finding on party identification. All right, I think we're done. Thank you very much for coming. There is a book signing one level off of the archives bookstore.