Fundraising with John Boehner and the "Glass Cliff"

Last Saturday, we held an important fundraising event. The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, came down from Washington as a special guest speaker, showing support for both Martha McSally and Andy Tobin (who is running in Congressional District 1). These past two weeks have been almost entirely focused on making calls and writing emails to invite supporters and donors. It was not entirely germane to my project, but it was more than a little cool to see the third most powerful man in the nation speak. March 31st was the deadline for the first quarter fundraising report. Martha out-raised her opponent the last two quarters and Saturday's event must certainly have helped this quarter.  

Meanwhile, I've been continuing independent research. In their study on women candidates, Michelle K. Ryan, S. Alexander Haslam, and Clara Kulich made an interesting point: "An alternative to a group difference approach would involve examination of the context surrounding women's political participation. One way in which this approach can be achieved is by examining the types of political opportunities women are offered, the positions they achieve when they take on political roles, and the barriers they face both in attaining and in filling those roles."

Well, the aforementioned study would suggest that women are preferentially selected to contest hard-to-win seats. It cited previous research (Ryan and Haslam, 2005) that observed the top 100 companies in the London Stock Exchange. In a bearish stock market, companies that appointed women to be board members were more likely to have had consistently poorer performance in the preceding 5 months before the appointment than those that had appointed men to their boards. Consequently, these positions were precarious, and these women faced an increased chance for failure: "Moreover, these positions are likely to.... expose women to greater stress than men and to make women vulnerable to higher risk of blame for negative outcomes for which they are not responsible" They described this as the "glass cliff".

These findings just might point to another reason women candidates are questioned about their ability to handle a position of leadership.