Why So Few Women In Congress? Ctd

Why So Few Women In Congress? Ctd:

by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:

With regards to your post about women not running, Fox and Lawless followed up the study with a book, It Takes a Candidate.  They found that women don't run for office because they feel less qualified than men to run.  Lawless and Fox interviewed women and men from four professions that candidates tend to come from: education, medicine, non-profits, and the law.  Women were far less likely to say they felt they were qualified to run for office than men, even though they have the same credentials.
Also, women are more likely than men to point to the invasion of their personal and family lives as reasons they don't want to run for office.  Therefore, it is the problem with gendered psyche and traditional family roles that tends to be the reason that women don't run.  The other problem they found was that men are far more likely to be asked to run by members of the political community, and as a result men tend to have better political support systems prior to declaring their candidacies.

Speaking of women in politics, below are some details about the upcoming HBO series "Veep" (trailer above):

Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice-President Selina Meyer, who is neither corrupt nor politically extreme but harried, maddened by her job’s taunting combination of power and powerlessness, and forever at risk of public embarrassment. Meyer’s dominant mood—panic blunted by exhaustion, as she attempts, cursing, to outrun a political shit storm—will be familiar to viewers of "The Thick of It," Iannucci’s fine BBC sitcom about British ministerial life, or "In the Loop," a companion film that used some of the same actors to tell a darker story of Anglo-American ineptness and bad faith in the prelude to an Iraq-style war.
"Veep" is the second attempt to bring Iannucci’s political satire to American television. The first, an ABC pilot made in 2007, transposed the action to the office of a goofily innocent U.S. congressman; Iannucci, who was not in charge of that production, says that the experience left him feeling "slightly soiled."