Breaking Barriers

Across Canada, there is growing recognition of the need for greater gender representation in politics, particularly at the municipal level where policy decisions directly shape everyday life. While progress over the past decade has increased the visibility of women in local government, representation alone has not eliminated the gendered barriers women continue to face once they enter political office. This blog argues that municipal politics, often framed as more accessible and community-oriented, remains shaped by deeply gendered expectations around leadership, media scrutiny, and family responsibility. Drawing on an interview with Skylar Franke, City Councillor for Ward 11, this analysis demonstrates how women in municipal politics must navigate persistent cultural and institutional constraints even as formal opportunities expand.

Franke described the gendered hostility women face in politics as both normalized and deeply violent;

Women are made fun of for their appearances, not their policy ideas. There's a lot of really misogynistic hatred sent to female politicians; especially if you are a member of the 2SLGBT+ community or of a diverse background, you get it even worse. There are colleagues of mine – not on this council but across Ontariowho have been sent rape threats.

Despite being young, highly educated, and electorally successful, Franke has faced online harassment, bullying, and misogynistic attitudes throughout her time in office. Rather than deterring her, these experiences have strengthened her commitment to advocating for young women and marginalized communities. Her experience illustrates both the progress that has been made in women’s political representation and the limits of that progress when structural and cultural barriers remain unaddressed.

Political Recruitment Through a Feminist Lens

Women seeking political office continue to encounter barriers that men rarely face, particularly heightened scrutiny of their competence, legitimacy, and ability to balance leadership with family life. These expectations are deeply gendered and reflect long-standing assumptions about who belongs in positions of political authority. Franke’s experience exemplifies these dynamics. During her campaign, she was required to repeatedly defend her qualifications — scrutiny that was intensified because she ran for office while pregnant. Her experience underscores how women’s bodies and personal lives are often treated as political liabilities rather than irrelevant to their capacity to govern.

This tension reflects broader critiques in feminist political scholarship. Gutierrez (2024) argues that strategies such as femvertising, which use feminist imagery to encourage women’s political participation, often prioritize symbolic inclusion over substantive change. While such approaches may increase the number of women entering politics, they do little to address the structural barriers women face once they are there. Franke’s experience aligns with this critique, and she argues that true progress demands moving beyond appearances and ensuring women's perspectives and agency are fully respected in leadership. Although women are increasingly encouraged to run for office, their perspectives, authority, and lived realities are frequently questioned or undermined in practice.

As Meeks and Domke (2016) note, politics has historically been constructed as a masculine domain, with men positioned as “guardians of the public sphere” while women are associated with the private sphere of home and care. Franke described how this dynamic continues to shape council culture, particularly through dismissive or bullying behaviour from male colleagues. She noted that women often feel pressure to adopt “male-like” behaviours to be taken seriously, particularly when advancing policy initiatives. This expectation places women in a double bind: conforming to masculine norms risks backlash, while displaying traditionally feminine traits undermines their authority.

In my opinion, again, it's like that's a traditional male role: to be a bit more aggressive and to be more pushy. Whereas I find when females on council do the same thing, they are seen in a different light, they're seen as a b****, and they're too emotional.

Media Scrutiny and Gendered Political Culture

Media coverage plays a significant role in reinforcing these gendered dynamics. Women in politics face disproportionate scrutiny in online and social media spaces, where hostility toward female leadership often manifests through harassment, personal attacks, and gendered stereotypes. Franke’s experience reflects this reality. She described receiving hateful messages and comments that had little to do with policy and everything to do with her identity as a young woman in power.

To manage this environment, Franke argued that having a dedicated assistant to manage social media would allow her to remain focused on her policy goals without internalizing hostile rhetoric.

[U]nfortunately, social media is somewhat necessary in this job because you want to communicate to your public at the same time, [but] it's where horrible, nasty, awful things are said. … if we could have somebody delegated to run our social media, that would help because then we wouldn't see as much of that toxicity.

This strategy highlights an important point: women's political labour increasingly includes managing the emotional and psychological consequences of online abuse. Much of this abuse focuses on characteristics unrelated to policy or performance, such as appearance or emotion, yet this additional labour is rarely acknowledged as part of political leadership.

Research supports these observations. Courtney et al. (2023, 984) demonstrate that women in politics are punished both for adopting masculine leadership styles and for conforming to traditional femininity, leaving no neutral behavioural space. Women who assert authority are often labelled aggressive, while those who display empathy or emotion are dismissed as weak. Franke’s experience illustrates how this double bind operates at the municipal level, reinforcing a political culture that remains hostile to women’s leadership despite rhetorical commitments to gender equality.

Family, Care, and Political Legitimacy

Perhaps the most revealing barriers Franke encountered related to family and caregiving expectations. While canvassing during her third trimester, she was frequently asked questions about childcare plans, her age, and whether she could realistically manage motherhood alongside political office. These questions were not posed as neutral concerns but as implicit challenges to her legitimacy as a candidate.

When nine months pregnant, a couple of people [asked] ‘what are you gonna do with the baby after/if you get elected?’ It was, ‘I will either take care of him or my partner will take care of him. It's not like I'm going to leave him in a box while I'm at City Hall.’

Franke’s election and subsequent transition into office shortly after the birth of her son directly challenged these assumptions. With support from her partner and the flexibility afforded by her role, she demonstrated that political leadership and motherhood are not mutually exclusive. However, her experience also underscores how women continue to bear the burden of justifying this balance. As Durbin and Tomlinson (2014, 309) argue, career trajectories are shaped by organizational cultures and gendered expectations that place responsibility for care disproportionately on women.

The expectation that women must choose between family and political life reflects broader societal failures to recognize care as a collective responsibility rather than an individual burden.

There are three of us that are under 40 on council and all three of us either have toddlers or are about to have a baby. I'd say that impacts who runs because, still socially [it is] predominantly the woman who takes care of kids. … If I want to have a family and have a couple kids [and] I also want to do politics, it's still possible to do it, it just might be harder. And so I think some people choose obviously to have a family and maybe they'll do politics later. Again, you can see that represented in the ages of who is on council.

When women are excluded from politics or discouraged from entering it due to caregiving expectations, municipal governance loses critical perspectives shaped by lived experience. The underrepresentation of women across different ages, family structures, and backgrounds risks producing political institutions that are disconnected from the realities of the communities they serve.

Conclusion

Skylar Franke’s experience reveals that while women’s representation in municipal politics has improved, meaningful equality remains constrained by gendered political culture, media scrutiny, and entrenched expectations around care and family. Her leadership demonstrates that resilience is not simply individual endurance but a response to systemic barriers that continue to shape women's political participation. Increasing the number of women in office improves descriptive representation, but genuine political equality requires transforming the institutional cultures and gendered expectations that continue to shape women's experiences once elected. Municipal politics will only become truly representative when women are not required to overcome gendered barriers simply to perform the political work for which they were democratically elected.