Youth
Driven by the shared belief that all young voices should be heard, Raise Our Voice Australia has proudly partnered with The Body Shop Australia to ask young women and gender diverse Australians about their political engagement.
With just under 500 responses, this research captured their reflections on media reporting and politics, and the impact this has on their political actions.
Click here to access the report.
Sex, Lies and Question Time
Kate Ellis
Hardie Grant Books $32.99
By magic and genius commissioning, here is a perfect book for right now (with another one coming), dealing with catastrophic misogyny in the Australian parliament, complete with enraging stories of what happens to women when they participate in politics.
Sex, Lies and Question Time is filled with detail, so well-contextualised and so damned zeitgeisty, it would be tempting to imagine author and former Labor politician Kate Ellis snuck out there and planted a few live stories among journalists before publication date. But the former minister in the Rudd government had no need. The impetus for the book is clear at the beginning of chapter two when she gives an example of what women politicians deal with every day, not just her day, not just progressive women. When Ellis arrived in Canberra, she reveals she was asked: “The only thing anyone really wants to know about you, Kate, is how many blokes you had to f--- to get into parliament”?
Ellis didn’t just get mad, she also got even. She was only 27 when elected to parliament, 30 when Kevin Rudd appointed her to be Minister for Youth and Sport, the youngest ever Federal minister. Now she’s gone. Her book goes a long way to explaining why no woman in her right mind would ever want to be in parliament and why we must change that.
Click here to read the full article published by the Sunday Morning Herald on 2 April 2021 and to learn more about the book.
Summary of facts and figures on the participation of young people in politics based on 2020 figures.
Click here to access the infographic.
After Hillary Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in June 2016—the first woman in American history nominated for president by a major political party—she tweeted a picture of her dancing with a young girl. The caption read, "To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want—even president. Tonight is for you."
It's widely assumed that female politicians serve as role models to other women and girls, inspiring them to become politically engaged. Research on the subject, however, has produced mixed results on the actual extent of this effect.
In a paper recently published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities, two University of Notre Dame political scientists take a closer look at the influence of female politicians as role models. They found that although the role model effect is real, it comes with nuance: Only new and viable female candidates had an effect, and the effect applied only to young women.
Christina Wolbrecht, associate professor of political science, and David Campbell, Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy and chair of the Department of Political Science, employed a panel design, a first in this area of study, to examine female politicians' influence. The pair studied female candidates for major offices—U.S. House, U.S. Senate and governor—and their effects on female political engagement using data from the 2006-07 Faith Matters survey, taken at a time when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House and Clinton announced her first run for presidency.
Wolbrecht and Campbell focused on both viable candidates, who are more likely to garner more attention, and new candidates who were running for seats held by men.
"Most studies of the role model effect look at the impact of the presence of female role models on all women," said Wolbrecht. "One of our central contributions was to focus on the importance of age."
What they found, Wolbrecht said, was that these new, viable female candidates created more political discussion and engagement in young women specifically. No influence was observed on older women.
Click here to read the full article published by Phys.org on 29 March 2017.
Click here to access the study.