The Confidence Gap Keeping Women Out of Congress

The surprise resignation of Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene has created a rare open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Last week, 22 candidates – 17 Republicans, three Democrats, an independent, and a libertarian – filed to run for her seat. But for all its ideological diversity, this crowded field is quite similar in one key respect: Just four of the 22 candidates are women.

This imbalance is nothing new. When then-Rep. Adam Schiff vacated his House seat in 2024, only three of the 16 candidates who qualified to replace him were women. In the 2022 special election for the late Alaska Congressman Don Young’s House seat, women accounted for just 10 of the 48 candidates. Time and again, when a congressional seat opens up, men outnumber women at the starting line – often by a lot.

Open congressional seats attract people who possess an entrepreneurial spirit, confidence about their political abilities, and just plain old chutzpah. But why do so few women take the leap? Decades of research point to a persistent gap in self-perceptions: Men are more likely to look in the mirror and see a qualified candidate, while women often see someone staring back at them who lacks the credentials, skills, or experience they believe the job requires.

These perceptions are understandable. After all, men occupy 72% of seats in Congress, serve as governors in 37 states, comprise two-thirds of state legislators, and lead 63 of the nation’s 100 largest cities. The face of American politics remains overwhelmingly male, so perhaps it’s no surprise that many women assume the deck is stacked against them.

Yet research consistently finds that women perform just as well as men when they run for office. They raise just as much money. They receive comparable media coverage. And they win at the same rates. If women knew the playing field was more level than it appears, would more of them step onto it?

Our recent research suggests that the answer might be yes. On Election Day in 2025, we conducted an exit poll of voters in Charlottesville, Virginia, and asked a simple question: Do you believe you are qualified to run for office?

But our poll came with a twist. One group of voters received a straightforward question: “Overall, how qualified do you think you are to run for office?” The other group answered the same question – but only after learning that women who run for office raise just as much money and are just as likely as men to win.

The results were striking. Among voters who saw only the standard question, men were nearly three times as likely as women to consider themselves “very qualified” to run for office (11% versus 4%). But when voters first learned that female candidates perform just as well as men, the share of women who considered themselves “very qualified” more than tripled, to 13%. Men’s self-assessments, meanwhile, did not budge.

The pattern reversed at other end of the scale. Among voters who saw the standard question only, women were 16 percentage points more likely than men to consider themselves “not at all qualified” for political office. But in the group who first learned about women’s true success rates, the gender gap shrank to just 2 points. Remarkably, the effect held across party lines: For both Democrats and Republicans, a single sentence of factual information nearly erased the gender gap in self-assessed political qualifications.

With half a million elected offices in the United States, competition is essential for a healthy democracy. When women disproportionately opt out of these races, we lose the benefit of their expertise and talent. To change this, we must dispel the myths that prevent women from seeing themselves as viable candidates. Party leaders, elected officials, and political activists should remind potential candidates that the high-profile examples of gender bias we see in the news – like sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris – are actually the exception, not the rule. Arming women with these facts can help ensure that the next special election features far more than four female candidates out of 22.

Jennifer L. Lawless and Todd S. Sechser are professors of politics at the University of Virginia.