Sport as a Pathway for Women Seeking Elected Office

There is, of course, a large literature concerning political recruitment and the pathways to elected office. Much of this literature focuses on political parties and the continuing under-representation of women both in the pool of general election candidates and in Parliament. In the aftermath of a significant increase in the number of women elected to the U.S. Congress in the 2018 elections, the prominent American sports journalist Christine Brennan wrote an intriguing article in which she observed that a significant number of these newly elected women had backgrounds in competitive sport. A similar phenomenon can be observed in Canadian politics, where, for example, the Minister of the Environment in the past Liberal government, Catherine McKenna, regularly speaks of the importance of her participation in competitive sport as a crucial training ground for seeking and serving in elected office. To date, however, there has been no rigorous examination of the role sport plays in the recruitment of candidates and the willingness of women to put themselves forward as candidates. This paper seeks to begin to address this question. In recent surveys of federal election candidates, local party association presidents and party members, I included questions relating to the sporting background of respondents. Supplementing these data with an exhaustive examination of candidate and MP biographies and a series of open-ended interviews with politicians who have high-profile sporting backgrounds and party officials charged with candidate recruitment, this paper sheds light on the field of competitive sport as a fertile recruiting area for political candidates with an emphasis on questions of gender. It seeks to quantify this phenomenon in the Canadian case and to identify and explore the mechanisms that underlie it.