Public Keynote by Susan Banducci: "Twice as Hard, Half as Good? Reconciling Gendered Voting and Women’s Electoral Success"

November 30, 2017

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship has the pleasure to announce that on November 30 and December 1, 2017 it will host a symposium to mark the 70th birthday of its founding Director Elisabeth Gidengil. Dr Gidengil is Canada's pre-eminent scholar on political behaviour, gender and diversity, and the media, and has been a pioneering force in political science in Canada and abroad.

The symposium entitled "Trends and New Directions in Canadian Political Behaviour" will take place at the Faculty Club of McGill University in Montreal.  The public keynote presentation by Susan Banducci (University of Exeter), entitled “Twice as Hard, Half as Good? Reconciling Gendered Voting and Women’s Electoral Success” will start at 6pm on Thursday November 30, followed by a reception.

Abstract: There is a large body of research with consistent results showing that gender stereotypes are to be found in the media coverage of elections and the minds of voters. How can these findings be reconciled with the finding that when women choose to run for elected office that they do as well as men? How are women candidates able to achieve relatively equal levels of success when faced with gender stereotypes? Recent scholarship based on the US case argues that gender neutral election outcomes are not necessarily a result of gender neutral election inputs. Instead, fulfilling the adage that women must do twice as well to be thought half as good as men, the self-screening and greater campaign efforts of female candidates in anticipation of voter discrimination may allow them to achieve equal outcomes. In considering these propositions, I draw on Professor Elisabeth Gidengil’s key contributions to the comparative study of women, media and elections to understand the role of gender in election media coverage, voter responses and candidate success.

Organizational committee: Allison Harell, Melanee Thomas, Jason Roy, Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Dietlind Stolle, and Cameron Anderson. This symposium is made possible thanks to a Connection grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and financial support of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive, the Faculty of Arts at McGill University, and the Department of Political Science at McGill University.