Abstract
Socially and economically, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on women’s lives, but it is less clear whether the crisis also harmed the advancement of women’s political candidacies. In this thesis, I address the question: Did the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impact the rate of women running for state-level office in the 2020 elections? I use the variation in filing deadlines for primary candidates across state legislatures to attempt to isolate the impact of the pandemic on women’s candidate emergence. I create an original dataset of major party candidates for state house seats in 2018 and 2020 in six focus states and compare the proportion of candidates who are women in states with filing deadlines months before and after the pandemic hit the United States. My statistical analysis finds no evidence that the pandemic decreased women’s interest in running for office in 2020. I find that the onset of the pandemic is not associated with any significant change in the proportion of candidates who are women and is positively associated with an increase in the geographic spread of women candidates across individual districts. These findings suggest that once women have decided that they could see themselves running for office, their political ambition is resilient even to major social and economic disruptions. Future research into the causes of the patterns I observe could uncover important information about how to support and encourage more women to run for office, even once the pandemic ends.