We used the research below to write "Presidential Campaign Staffs Dominated By Men."
We started with this question: What is the relationship between gender and influence on presidential campaigns?
Having both worked on a presidential campaign, we know this is a difficult enough question to answer even if you are inside a campaign, and almost impossible outside. That said, salaries and titles have some meaning, so we decided to start with the publicly available data to answer these questions:
What percentage of the professional staff are women?
What percentage of the senior staff are women?
What percentage of the best-paid staff are women?
We started with the FEC disbursement data from the October 15 filing and pulled off payments to individuals or to consulting firms that we believed represented payments to people (as opposed to say, telephones, server space, ad purchases). Of those, we looked only at payments over $9,000 in the third FEC quarter (a $36,000/year salary).
We then tried to determine--mostly by looking at the names, but also by some web image searching--who was female and who was male. We relied heavily on GWU Action's ongoing catalogue of campaign staffers as a starting point, to determine gender and the role of the person in the campaign. Because of significant changes in John McCain's campaign in the last quarter, the FEC and staff data were too slight to draw meaningful conclusions.
We decided to look at positions of influence in three ways: the overall percentage of women on the third-quarter payroll earning $9,000 or more; the number of women in senior staff roles at the campaign headquarters; and the percentage of women in the top 20 paid staffers.
We did not include people who had reportedly left the campaign.
We encountered four major methodological hurdles.
(a) Consultants
Consultants make up a large part of several campaigns, and so it is difficult to determine what a payment to a consultant represents. Does $90,000 to Gremlin & Associates represent $90,000 to John Gremlin, Communications Specialist? Or does it represent $15,000 to John, $60,000 printing costs for flyers, and $15,000 to three of John's assistants?
We have done our best on a first cut of assigning major players to consultant groups, but need more help refining these guesses, and with determining about how much salary a payment represents. At a minimum, we figured it was fair to say that if a consultant group that
specializes in strategy was getting more than $20,000 for the third quarter, its lead liaison to the campaign probably had significant influence.
We did not code consulting companies for which we could not gender-identify the principal contact. However, the majority of political consulting firms are male-run and often have a lot of sway in the campaign; therefore, by not including most of the consulting firms, our overall numbers may suggest a more gender balanced picture than actually exists.
(b) Unpaid Staffers and Advisors
Several campaigns have unpaid staffers whose titles suggest they have major day-to-day leadership roles inside the campaign. Our guess is that they are being reimbursed, even though we cannot figure out how. We would like help finding out how people like Jonathan Prince, for
example, a deputy campaign manager for John Edwards, is paid. If he is not getting paid, that is important to know as well.
All of the campaigns also have people listed as senior advisors who are not paid. We believe unpaid senior advisors are more likely to have been given their titles in order to thank them for work done, or to showcase campaign support, or to formalize sporadic calls for help
and advice.
(c) Who has Institutional Power?
Every campaign is going to be different, but most have a working idea of who is senior staff. In this part of our investigation, we want to get at people whose power inside a campaign derives from titles that establish them as authorities. We coded these roles as Senior Staff:
Campaign Manager
Deputy Campaign Manager
Communications Director
Political Director
Field Director
Finance Director
Policy Director
Research Director
Traveling Chief of Staff
Internet Director
Director of Operations/COO
Chief Pollster
Chief Media Consultant
Senior Advisors who are paid well
We did not code as senior staff:
CTO (unless also the Internet Director)
CFO
Lawyers
Press Secretaries
With multiple media consultants, pollsters, and senior advisors we could not always tell who had the trappings of power inside a campaign.
We then called the campaigns to verify the senior staffers.
(d) Staff Locations, Especially in Finance
Since we are interested in how a campaign's agenda and message is set, we think the location, as well as role, of staffers is important. We wanted to get a good image of who is actually present at major meetings. This was often very hard to understand, especially for people in finance and fundraising, who often earn a good deal of money but work independently with their own set of contacts.
We have chosen not to include spouses.
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The next steps, to make this a really worthwhile study:
> Get the good information about who is the principal recipient of the money at each consulting firm, and what he or she is doing for the campaign;
> Get good information about the people who are considered senior staff;
> Get good information about the people who are considered senior advisors and wield
actual influence in the campaign;
> Find out through what entity each staffer is getting paid where it's unclear, or
whether he or she is in fact working for free
Of course, it would be extremely helpful if the campaigns put an organization chart up on their websites.
We would also like help fact-checking what we have already researched. I know there are always errors in transcription, let alone analysis, and fact-checking will undoubtedly reveal some interesting--and perhaps meaningful--mistakes.