Why are so many female candidates 'sacrificial lambs'?

A record 76 women were elected to the House of Commons in the last federal election in 2011. But that mark was still just a little over 24 per cent of the 308 MPs. And critics say that's not enough -- that we need more women to run and to win.

Melanee Thomas, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, says it's not just about how many female candidates a party runs, it's also about where they run. She says women are too often nominated in ridings where they don't stand a chance. 

(The full interview is available in the audio player above. The following portions have been edited for clarity and length.)

You've looked at riding competitiveness and candidate gender in recent Canadian federal elections. What did you find? 

What we wanted to do is we wanted to see whether there was any kind of association between past party support stability in a district and the kind of candidate that ran. What was easiest for us to get was candidate gender. What we found was that notably, men are much more likely to be placed in ridings where their parties are safe and strong. Women are disproportionately less likely to be placed there....There's some theories of representation that talk about how important it is for the legislature to look like the population that it's supposed to represent, and this shows us that the people who are making the decisions that directly influence whether or not that legislature is representative of Canadians are systematically setting things up so that it's not representative. 

So I guess there's two possible takeaways from that. Either these are token nominations to try to make their gender numbers look better - or parties are looking at tough battles and saying, within the upper echelons of the party decision-making, that men have a better chance of winning close battles than women do. 

I think it's both, actually...I think in most ridings, a lot of party associations know that the odds of them winning are small, and they just want to find somebody who's good and is prepared to do party service that way. Where we think that it becomes a little bit more pernicious is when parties think that they can win...This is where stereotypes about what makes a good politician become relevant. 

So this is our theory: politics is stereotyped as a masculine activity. It's about competition, it's about fighting. If you listen to how even debates get framed, we talk about it as a boxing match, knock-out punches, stick-handling around the opposition, things like this... Women are not stereotyped as good fighters, which is a bit weird, and I think it's probably unfair in terms of how we look at political competition. When you think about a good politician as being somebody who's got good judgment, they're intelligent, they've got skills from an occupation, these are not things that are particularly gendered, especially in our current economy and in our current context. So the idea that competitive districts where you need to "fight" are places where men will do better? The data doesn't actually support that when we look at actual election results.