By Bob Gibson

Why aren’t more women in elective office today?

One reason might be that not enough have been asked to run.

Studies show that men generally do not wait to be asked by friends, colleagues or parties to throw their hat in the ring. Even if they don’t wear hats, men just announce for an office and go for it.

Women, whether they wear hats or not, more often wait to be asked.

What is clear in Virginia right now is that this year, as usual, many more men are seeking state legislative positions than are women. 

Across the nation, 23 out of every 100 state legislators are women.

In Virginia, the numbers are a bit lower. Only 19 of 100 members of the House of Delegates are women and just eight women serve in the 40-member Virginia Senate. Two of them are retiring this year.

Of the first 116 candidates to announce for the House thus far, fewer than 20 percent are women. In the State Senate contests on the ballot, 18 percent of the first 61 candidates to announce are women.

Politics can be a cantankerous business. Maybe it would be a little less so if more women joined the boys.

We live in a nation that believes in doing great things together when we can agree on what those great things are. Settling the West, defeating Hitler and freeing captive nations, going to the moon, attaching cell phones to every other ear and identifying ourselves by the T shirts or tattoos we wear all are things, great or small, we Americans have accomplished together.

There is much to find common cause to do. Finding and defeating Osama Bin Laden was one of those things. Improving public education and getting government spending under control would be others that could gain bipartisan agreement. Some things are better done and more easily accomplished if two parties get together and work out their differences.

Electing more women to office may be a key to achieving that type of consensus. Women are drastically underrepresented in state and federal office, which hurts our politics because women tend to be better consensus seekers than men and much less prone to the combative effects of excessive testosterone. (Although a few women in politics behave as testosterone pill poppers, the vast majority do not.)

The women I have covered in Virginia politics over more than 30 years tended to be at least as smart and savvy as the men and generally better at finding ways to meld interests. They do not run around and spike the football.

Many people still cannot quite accept women in leadership positions. As I was riding the train back from New York City to Charlottesville this week, I noticed a blatant example of that. The iconic photo of President Obama silently watching a video feed with 15 top aides at the White House during the Bin Laden operation two Sunday nights ago was doctored in a reprint in a New York Hasidic newspaper, Der Zeitung.

The images of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Director of Anti-Terrorism Audrey Tomason were digitally erased from the group, according to the New York Post, which reprinted the doctored photo and reported that the Jerusalem Post said the offending paper “didn’t want to show women in authority positions.“

Women are not only generally better at building consensus, they genuinely care about solving economic and social issues that affect families.

They comprise more than 50 percent of the American electorate and less than a quarter of the legislative teams, including Congress.

No woman I can think of in Virginia politics is remembered for scandal, which is hardly true of the men even though Virginia can boast it has far fewer scandals among its public officials than most other states.

Lingering sexual stereotypes are unfair to woman and yet very real in politics and, to some extent, in the media.

As the media increasingly treat politics as entertainment, or as a game or sport, women are judged and questioned about what they wear or how they do their hair.

Clearly the most outrageous hair in the business of politics is Donald Trump’s, so let’s restrict the coverage and commentary on political hair.  By the way, not even Trump should not be judged by his hair.