Women Candidates Willing To Accept Lower Pay To Avoid Sexism

What the Study Asks

Frederik Klaaborg Kjøller and Lene Holm Pedersen explore how sexism and harassment shape which political jobs candidates prefer. The paper asks whether experience with or fear of victimization pushes women candidates to seek different working conditions in politics — and whether those trade-offs differ from men’s.

How the Authors Study It

The authors surveyed political candidates who stood in the 2021 Danish local elections and embedded a conjoint experiment that presented respondents with competing political job offers that varied on multiple attributes. The survey also collected direct measures of candidates’ experiences of sexism and harassment and their assessments of personal risk of victimization. This design lets the authors compare stated job preferences across genders and quantify how concerns about sexist treatment alter candidates’ willingness to accept different formal job terms.

Key Findings

• Women candidates report substantially more sexism and harassment than men and judge their personal risk of victimization to be much higher.
• In the conjoint experiment, women display markedly stronger preferences for equal and respectful working environments compared with men.
• Preferences for formal job attributes — such as political position, pay, and workload — are similar for men and women in baseline comparisons.
• Crucially, when avoiding sexism is at stake, women are far more willing than men to trade off formal terms: their willingness to accept lower remuneration and higher workload to escape sexist environments is more than double that of men.

Why This Matters for Representation and Parties

These results show that sexist work environments impose a measurable, gendered cost on political careers. Because women candidates are more likely to accept worse formal terms to avoid harassment, parties and local institutions may systematically lose or disincentivize women from certain positions, affecting recruitment, career progression, and the diversity of political office-holders. By measuring candidates’ actual trade-offs, the study quantifies a specific mechanism through which workplace culture can shape gendered political representation and points to the potential value of policies and norms that reduce harassment and equalize working conditions in politics.