While the number of women in political office around the world is on the rise, men continue to outnumber women at high rates in top leadership positions. There are many reasons why it remains difficult for women to reach, and keep, powerful positions within politics that cover a myriad of electoral, institutional, and individual conditions. Women often become leaders of organizations precisely when leadership conditions are most difficult, and therefore less attractive to powerful men (i.e. the glass cliff). Under these conditions, we might expect women to face greater challenges during their leadership, potentially affecting how long they are able to maintain their leadership roles. Thus, it is impossible to investigate how gender impacts leadership without accounting for selection conditions that place leaders in power. In this paper we take a holistic approach to examining the gendered nature of leadership survival. We investigate how the conditions under which party leaders are chosen, coupled with party performance while in office, impact how long men and women serve as party leaders. In order to do so, we construct a two-stage model that accounts for the endogeneity of the selection process alongside the impact of party performance on the survival of leaders. Using data from 212 leadership terms in eleven industrialized democracies between 1979 and 2018, we find that while women leaders are selected under similar conditions to men, their leadership tenure is more vulnerable to shifts in vote share. Vote share appears to be the main driver of women’s replacement. Men are less susceptible to changes in votes share than women but are also punished for poor poll performance and government loss.

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Andrea S. Aldrich is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University and her research interests are focused on political representation, gender, and comparative political institutions. Her work examines the relationship between internal political party dynamics and legislative representation. She is particularly interested in investigating the influence of internal party organization on gender equality in elections and party leadership, and her research has recently been published in JCMS: the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, and Politics & Gender. Before arriving at Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Houston with the Political Parties Database under the direction of Dr. Susan Scarrow, a visiting scholar at Texas A&M University, and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.

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