WHAT DOES IT take to win the presidency, and do women have an equal shot at the prize?
America has never elected a woman president, of course, and why we have not is a part of the bigger puzzle of our nation’s gaping gender gap in political representation. The United States ranks 81st on the World Economic Forum’s measure of women elected to national congresses, below Germany, Canada, and Mexico, and just a notch above Morocco. Currently, more than 80 percent of America’s governors and members of Congress are men. In the entire span of American history, 11,872 men have served in the U.S. House and Senate, compared to 308 women.
Why does the United States lag so far behind on women’s political leadership? Is it that we believe men are the norm and women are the exception when it comes to electing our democratic leaders?
“The requirement to be the first woman president, you have to be better, faster, stronger, smarter, kinder, better looking—all of these things to be the first woman anything, to replace a seat that’s always been held by men,” Democratic strategist Tara McGuinness said. “The threshold for viability for the first woman president will be higher than the threshold has been for men for eternity. That’s been the case for the House and Senate and Fortune 500 companies. The margin of error for women in leadership is much smaller than the margin of error for men. I would love to be proven wrong! I hope to be!”
McGuinness’s view that a double standard puts obstacles in the way of a women’s path to elected office is widely shared—especially by women. According to polling by the Pew Research Center in 2014, for example, almost half of all women said that women were held to higher standards, and that was the reason there were not more women in high political leadership. (Only about a quarter of men agreed.) In the same survey, four in ten women said many Americans were not ready to elect a woman to higher office.
At its most fundamental, the double standard holds that male is the default mode for a political leader, that the qualities voters prefer in candidates are stereotypically masculine ones. Men face voters holding the benefit of the doubt that they have the right qualities for the job. Women, on the other hand, are judged by a measuring stick calibrated to the masculine persona.
To put it more starkly: Sexism is the principal cause of our missing political women. Without question, acts of everyday sexism against women who dare to run for office are still committed by some reporters, pundits, politicians, and voters. And let’s be clear, in the not-so-recent past, biased views on women’s leadership were prevalent. In 1977, 50 percent of Americans said women were not “suited for politics,” according to the General Social Survey, the gold standard of public opinion research.
So as we consider whether America is ready for a woman president, we need to determine whether sexism remains a major obstacle to a woman’s chance of election. Do Americans today enter the voting booth primed to hold women candidates to higher or different standards? If the double standard is in fact the cause of our missing political women, how then does it work its mischief?
LET’S LOOK FIRST at the media, frequently accused by politicians, political commentators, and feminist advocates of treating women candidates by different standards. Ask just about any woman in politics about this, and she will have a story about unfair gender-based treatment by the press. Polling after the 2008 election found that women were far more likely than men to observe media bias in the coverage of both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. National surveys by the political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox, authors of landmark studies on women’s political ambition, found that a majority of women believed that Clinton and Palin faced sexist media coverage.
But as surprising as it may seem, a new picture has emerged that suggests that the media does not in fact cover women politicians in a biased way. In an analysis of 2006 Senate election press coverage, American University political scientist Danny Hayes found no evidence of “direct gender stereotyping” by the media and “minimal evidence that news coverage promoted gender stereotyping.” In another study published in 2015, Hayes and American University political scientist Jennifer Lawless reviewed more than 4,000 articles about 350 U.S. House races in the 2010 midterm elections. Women and men were equally likely to have their looks and family life mentioned; women and men were equally likely to be described as being empathetic, a conventionally feminine trait, and displaying leadership, a conventionally masculine trait; women and men were equally likely to have their policies discussed. In conclusion, they found no significant difference in how men and women were covered or the amount of coverage they received.
In short, once you compare how the media currently treats men and women, you find that on balance they receive the same treatment. Men and women both receive negative and positive coverage. Men and women both attract comments about their clothes, their looks, their experience, and their behavior. Men and women both are evaluated on the typical traits voters seek in political leaders, such as compassion and leadership. Most importantly, no study has ever directly linked sexist media treatment to voter attitudes. Take all these findings together and you have an explanation for the seeming paradox. Unfair treatment is in the eye of the beholder, and often the gaze doesn’t take in the full picture.
If the media isn’t imposing a double standard on women candidates, then perhaps gender bias against women candidates is being cued by attacks by their opponents. The academic research tells us, however, that negative commercials, a common tactic in American elections, have less effect against women candidates than they do against men. In other words, the gender difference helps women rather than hurts them. Moreover, negative advertising might not pack much of a punch—at least in high-profile races in our current electoral landscape. In an important book on the 2012 presidential election, The Gamble, political scientists Lynn Vavreck and John Sides concluded that negative advertising had only fleeting and marginal influence over presidential vote choice.
If it’s not the media, and it’s not their opponents, could it be how women behave on the campaign trail that is triggering latent assumptions about political leadership that disadvantage women?
Consider crying, to some the telltale sign of membership in the weaker and more emotional sex. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is so catastrophic to a woman’s political career—at least that is what you could conclude from the thousands of words journalists have penned on the exceedingly rare cases of women crying on the campaign trail. To test the assumption that women candidates are hurt more than men by emotional displays, Dartmouth political scientist Deborah Jordan Brooks decided to compare how voters respond to emotional outbursts by candidates of both sexes. In a large experimental survey, she gave participants several identical scenarios, describing candidates who cried or expressed anger, changing only the name of the hypothetical politician, to determine if they responded differently to men and women. Crying did pose some risk to candidates; their strength ratings fell somewhat. But the crying candidates on balance gained more than they lost, because the survey respondents perceived a candidate who cried, whether a man or a woman, to be more honest and more empathetic. Expressions of anger, on the other hand, were unequivocally damaging to candidates of both sexes. Together these scenarios demonstrated that people did not judge men and women differently on emotionality. “Men and women are similarly penalized for both crying and anger,” Brooks wrote. Even more surprising were the potential implications of her conclusions. The absence of a difference in the evaluations suggested that people held different ideas about gender than was commonly assumed, she surmised. If stereotypes about women’s emotionality “do not exist in the current era,” then when a female candidate cries, “there is nothing to activate.” In short, Brooks wrote, “we should not be too quick to conclude that the public holds double standards for female candidates.”
Perhaps the double standard operates on a more basic level. Could it be simply that substantial numbers of voters do not see women as leaders and prefer to elect men? If so, it doesn’t require a journalist or an opposing candidate or a slip by a woman candidate to raise doubts about women’s leadership abilities. Instead, without any external prompting or direction, voters judge women candidates through gendered stereotypes that disadvantage women. In other words, on some very deep level, voters are sexist.
Again, the recent scholarship points in the opposite direction. Kathleen Dolan, a leading scholar on women in politics, in a study on congressional candidates, found that party, not gender, was the main driver of how people viewed candidates. In other words, the operative stereotypes were those about what Democrats and Republicans were like. Hayes, in the article on the 2006 Senate elections we saw earlier, examined public opinion survey data about candidates, in addition to conducting a media analysis. He tested for two of the principal gender stereotypes that have long been thought to shape women’s electoral chances: compassion and strength. Voters weren’t free from bias, but just as Dolan found, partisan stereotypes rather than gender stereotypes shaped voters’ views of candidates; voters assumed Republicans were stronger leaders and Democrats were more compassionate. “Despite the literature showing that people perceive women as more compassionate and empathetic than men, and men as stronger leaders than women,” Hayes concluded, “I did not find this to be true in assessments of political candidates.” Hayes and Lawless’s analysis of the 2010 House elections likewise confirmed that the assessments people made of candidates were influenced by partisanship, ideology, and incumbency, not by sex. To our point, the key findings of these studies were that voters were not sexist. They did not hold women congressional candidates up to a masculine ideal of a political leader and find them lacking.
Brooks, in her 2013 award-winning book He Runs, She Runs, went even further in debunking commonly held beliefs about the power of the double standard. She created a series of hypothetical scenarios to comprehensively test whether voters held gendered attitudes that hurt women’s chances of election. (Her study about crying and anger was one of these tests and is included in the book.) Women did not have to be smarter or more experienced in order to perform as well as men in elections; men and women of similar qualifications were rated equally qualified to hold elective office. Women were not punished for displaying conventionally feminine traits, as Brooks’s crying and anger study demonstrated. Granted, women were judged harshly if they appeared to lack empathy, but so too were men. “People heavily penalized candidates, male or female, for acting in an uncaring manner,” Brooks wrote.
But if women candidates aren’t hurt when they fulfill expectations of how a woman should behave, are they hurt when they violate expectations of how a woman should behave? Governor Jennifer Granholm put the dilemma vividly. “If you had a woman governor who behaved like Governor Chris Christie, who would have his staff follow him around to catch the moments when he confronted somebody by yelling at them, or by shaking an ice cream cone at them, she would be labeled as a bitch and unlikable. So, yes, women absolutely have to be careful about seeming to be shrill, seeming to be bitchy, and yet being tough and strong. That fine line is one that every woman who runs for office has to navigate,” she said.
We are in the territory of the B-word. Women leaders face an impossible choice, a double bind. If they are warm, they risk being perceived as weak. If they are strong, they risk being perceived as pushy, cold, and unlikable.
This particular variety of sexism has recently gained much attention, thanks to Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s advice from her rare perch at the top of corporate America. (Among Fortune 500 companies, women make up only 5 percent of CEOs and only 15 percent of all C-suite executives.) In her global bestseller Lean In, Sandberg cites research that finds that “success and likability are negatively correlated.” For example, women who negotiate their salaries are viewed as demanding, and both men and women prefer to work for a woman who did not negotiate rather than one who did. If it is this treacherous for one woman to ask for a raise from one supervisor, think how much more daunting it must be for a woman to ask thousands or even millions of men and women for their vote.
Essentially, the settled opinion about the double bind says that when women play the man’s game the way men play it, they lose. But like many of the other myths about the double standard, this one does not appear to be true, at least not for politicians and not anymore.
Brooks found “no evidence of a backlash” against candidates who acted tough. They were not perceived to be uncaring, unfeminine, or unlikable. “My results show that women can be tough in a highly ‘unfeminine’ dominant and forceful manner and not get penalized for it by the public,” Brooks wrote. Indeed, acting outside the bounds of conventional femininity gave women candidates a boost. Women’s favorability ratings went up, not down, when they projected toughness, and tough-acting women were viewed as more likely to be effective presidents. Taking these findings on toughness with those of the crying study, which showed no penalty for acting in conventionally feminine ways, Brooks concluded, “the conventional wisdom about a double bind for female candidates is wrong.”
America is not, of course, a postgender nation. Some subtle gender distinctions persisted, Brooks found, but they had no significant impact on women’s electoral chances. Overall the public evaluated women candidates as “politicians,” not as “ladies,” Brooks explained, and held them to the “standards of good leadership rather than to the standards of good femininity.” The double standard and sexist stereotypes, Brooks concluded, did not “hold back female candidates on the campaign trail.”
Although everyone agrees that the double standard has abated over time, some experts think it lingers in a more subtle guise and don’t share Brooks’s optimism. Some have demonstrated that women incumbents draw more primary challengers, which, they conclude, suggests that women are perceived to be easier to beat. Others have found that women candidates tend to be objectively more qualified than men, leading them to posit that women have to be objectively superior candidates—for example, smarter or more experienced—to achieve similar rates of success. These results don’t necessarily tell us anything about how voters judge women candidates. How potential women candidates view themselves, how they perceive the double standard and assess their odds of victory, could instead be the cause of the phenomenon of the superwoman candidates. In other words, if women assume they face a higher hurdle, they will run only if they think they can clear it. As retired Republican senator Olympia Snowe told me, “Women in general think that they don’t know enough about the issues yet, that they have to be more well versed before they run for office. I say to them, ‘Do you think that your male colleagues give that a second thought? No, they don’t.’”
But for all the disagreement about the nuances of the double standard, one fact stands out. When women run, they win at similar rates to men. “Winning elections has nothing to do with the sex of the candidate,” three political scientists concluded twenty-five years ago in a widely cited study. Almost every scholar since has reached similar conclusions. As Dolan wrote more than a decade ago, “Levels of bias are low enough to no longer provide significant impediments to women’s chances of election.”
So far, we see that many of the myths about the double standard are just that—myths. Then where are the women? Why are women vastly underrepresented among America’s political leaders?
Our history explains a large part of the gap, as we’ll see. Only in the last quarter century have women been able to compete with men on anything close to a level playing field. In the contemporary era, experts currently have settled on two likely reasons for America’s unusually large gender gap in women’s officeholding.
One, fewer women than men run for office, making it difficult to make progress toward parity. Influential research by Lawless and Fox on the “gender gap in political ambition” demonstrates that, compared to men, women express significantly less interest in running for office than men do, hold themselves to higher standards in judging their own qualifications, and rate their chances of victory lower. This suggests, as Lawless, Brooks, and others have noted, that the conventional wisdom about the sexism women politicians face may itself be the source of women’s more critical self-evaluation. In other words, women assume they have to be better, stronger, and smarter to win elections because they think that voters will judge them more harshly than they judge men.
Two, the rules of the game—the structure of our electoral system—puts up obstacles to any new person or group. From our exceedingly high rates of incumbent reelection, to weak political parties, to winner-take-all elections, to America’s resistance to quotas (adopted in more than sixty nations to increase women’s representation), America’s political institutions block the rise of women. One of the strongest findings in the global scholarship on elections is that, in political scientist Lisa Baldez’s words, “electoral rules play a critical role in determining who gets elected.” Perhaps less hand-wringing about the American woman’s psyche—about her confidence gap, her ambition gap, or the need to lean in—and more attention to the structural impediments to women reaching gender parity in leadership might be in order.
Still, the heart of the matter is this: At least in any of the ways we have commonly assumed that the double standard undermines a woman’s chance of election, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that it does not. Campaigning while female is not a walk on a tightrope or a sprint over higher, pink-hued hurdles. Ginger Rogers had to dance backward in heels, but walk into any gathering of the Washington elite and you will see plenty of powerful women in pantsuits, sensible flats, and glasses. In the final analysis, being a woman is not a liability. And as we’ll see later, many consultants in both political parties have come to think it might even be an advantage.
“FIRST, I WOULD try to disabuse any woman that there are certain attributes or qualities you have to have to be successful. Certainly if my mother were here, that would be her advice,” Cecile Richards told me. Richards is the daughter of the late Ann Richards, the legendary Texas governor, and she has followed in her mother’s political footsteps. Beginning her career in the 1980s as a labor organizer, over the years Cecile has held a number of high-level political posts, including deputy chief of staff to Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi. In 2006, she became president of Planned Parenthood.
“Mom had none of the classic attributes you’d say are required to be a successful woman in politics. By the time she ran for governor, she was a recovering alcoholic—publicly. She was a divorcée—as they said back in the day. She was a liberal. She had an undergraduate degree from Baylor University, which is a fine institution, but she wasn’t a lawyer and she had no other professional degrees and skills. And she was single. All of those in Texas would almost immediately disqualify her from being a candidate for much of anything. But certainly for being a candidate for governor.”
In other words, if ever the double standard was an insuperable obstacle to a woman candidate, it should have stopped Ann Richards. But it didn’t. As Cecile Richards recalled of her mother’s campaign, “She went through fire and came out the other side. When she ran for governor, that was totally gloves off. There was no ‘We’re going to tone this down a little bit because we’re running against a woman.’” I assumed she was referring to the negative campaign Karl Rove managed for George W. Bush’s successful run to unseat Ann Richards in 1994, but she was in fact talking about attacks by fellow Democrats. “Oh my God! The Democratic primary the first time around, that was the worst thing I’ve ever been through. Everything was fair game and I think she felt it was tough. She’s a human being too. It was her friends and her family that kept her going. She went through the fire and came out the other side.”
In 1990, Ann Richards became the first woman elected governor in a Deep South state and only the sixth woman ever elected governor in the nation. Her story points to a potential alternative obstacle to women’s rise into political leadership: insider politics.
Political scientists agree that throughout the advanced democracies, political parties dominated by men have historically acted as “gatekeepers” blocking women’s access to office. To be sure, personal self-interest exerts a powerful force here. Most politicians are men, so from their perspective, any seat picked up by a woman is one men have lost. But far more important is the long-term interest of the group. Particularly in ideologically polarized democracies, party leaders have one overriding concern: Can their party’s nominee beat the opposing party’s nominee in the general election? And how insiders and large donors assess electability dramatically influences who they support in party primaries. Take Richards’s case. As Cecile described it, her mother seemed categorically unelectable.
It’s a familiar predicament for women politicians.
“I’ve been less discriminated against because of my ethnicity and probably more discriminated against because of my gender,” California state controller Betty Yee, a first-generation Chinese American, said during a campaign stop, answering a college student who asked her about running for office. “Discrimination doesn’t necessarily come from men. I’ve been a little astounded—oftentimes it’s the sisterhood that is lacking.” As Yee elaborated, gender bias manifested in a very specific context: campaign fund-raising. “I’ve asked people multiple times for donations before being taken seriously—especially new donors who I know give to men,” she told me.
In her 2014 primary, Yee was up against California’s second most powerful Democratic officeholder. “I was running against the speaker of the assembly, and the attitude was, ‘How can you possibly beat him? He will out-raise you.’” In her experience, she found that women were judged differently than men about whether they could win, women were sometimes harder on women than men were, and women donors were especially risk-averse. “The obstacles are more about perceptions about women being viable candidates,” she said. “Can they raise money? Can they do the rough-and-tumble? Can they deal with being judged?”
Yee was out-spent by a three-to-one margin, but her low-budget, grassroots campaign, in which she drove up and down the state of California for over a year to meet with any group who would have her, overcame that disadvantage. Ultimately, she won her primary in a recount by just a few hundred votes and then went on to defeat a Republican woman by a large margin in the general election.
What with the demands of fund-raising, the rigors of the campaign trail, and the personal attacks, you often hear that the nasty and brutish nature of American elections turns women off from politics. Democratic consultant Mary Hughes and Republican consultant Katie Packer Gage both cited the nature of campaigns as a barrier that deters women from running and thus depresses the number of women serving in office. “I think politics is very off-putting to a lot of women,” Gage told me, “because there is a sense on both sides that it’s a bit of an old boys’ club, and that it’s very dirty and dog-eat-dog and not really an environment that women want to partake in. I think the challenge is to educate women and convey that we’re not going to change things unless we have a seat at the table.”
But women political leaders take the sharp-elbowed competition in stride. “I mean, it’s challenging, of course. But if you want to make change, you just have to know that’s part of it,” Richards said. “Anything you’re going to do that’s going to be taking on big institutions and social mores, that makes a big difference in the world, is going to come with its share of attacks. So why not do something really worthwhile? Honestly, it doesn’t bother me too much. Maybe it’s just that the benefits outweigh whatever the rest of it is.” The tall, muscled, stone-faced man sitting at the reception desk at Planned Parenthood headquarters indicated that the attacks on Richards and her staff go far beyond run-of-the-mill partisan sniping. “I never really think about the negative side of the money or the campaigning,” EMILY’s List president Stephanie Schriock said. “Because when you’re in it, you find the most amazing passionate people, who care desperately about the future. When I walk in the doors and see this staff of dedicated, mostly young women, who are absolutely here to change the world, I am energized. I want to be part of it.” New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand recalled, in her book Off the Sidelines, how she felt about attacks by her Republican opponent in her first race: “My attitude was ‘Fuck ’em.’ One of the lessons I’d learned from my grandmother was to ignore negative press. Politics, she taught me, is a sport, just like football. You put on your protective gear, get out on the field, and hit your opponent as hard as you can. You should expect your opponent to do the same.”
In other words, you have to be tough to compete in the major leagues, attacks come with the job, and it’s all worth it. And like any competitor, sometimes you lose. “Everyone goes through loss—you don’t get that job you wanted. But not everyone in the world sees it on the front page of the LA Times,” Wendy Greuel, who was defeated in the 2013 Los Angeles mayoral election, told me.
“What’s interesting is that afterward, there are a lot of people who kind of look at you as though there was a death in the family, as though, ‘Wow, what’s going to happen to you now that you lost this race?’” She suspected that people did not treat men who lost in the same way, but no matter. It wasn’t in her DNA, she continued, to be deterred. “I remember President Clinton called afterward, to say, ‘Good job. You did your best. Now onto the next.’” And that was her attitude.
“You can’t go into a race thinking—if you are a woman or a man—’If I lose, it’s the end of the world.’ You have to be willing to do what it takes to win, to be part of the rough-and-tumble. You’ve got to be competitive. You have to give it your all.”
“I KNOW THERE is a lot of research out there on the barriers to a woman as president,” Democratic consultant Rose Kapolczynski, who ran several of Barbara Boxer’s winning U.S. Senate campaigns, told me. “I do think that when you get into life-and-death decisions, voters aren’t sure if women are tough enough to make those decisions. Can a women deal with foreign governments and war and the decision to place our armed forces in harm’s way? That is a little bit more troubling for voters. Women are still seen as weaker and more emotional, perhaps more cautious. So there is a different standard. On the other hand, some of those issues have changed as Americans have changed.”
Call it the double standard, limited edition. On the one hand, Americans have become acclimated to women serving in Congress, state legislatures, and city councils, and as we’ve seen, gender bias isn’t hurting women legislative candidates at the polls. But it has long been thought that voters doubt that women are tough enough for the top executive offices, such as governor and president, and in that way sexism places greater obstacles in the path of women who run for the top leadership posts. “Running for governor is harder than running for Congress if you’re a woman,” Democratic consultant Lisa Grove said. “You look at the kinds of women who’ve run successfully for governor, and they’re often attorney general types.” Grove gave the example of Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor who went on to become secretary of Homeland Security for Obama. “Napolitano was kind of badass as attorney general. She cracked down on Wall Street and scammers who preyed on the elderly.” In other words, in order to overcome the bias that women aren’t executive-caliber material, women have to overcompensate.
Is it true that the tired old gender stereotypes flare up when people choose governors and presidents? Does executive office present a higher hurdle for women to clear? In determining whether America is ready to elect a woman president, this is a central question.
“The research shows” was a common refrain from consultants, pollsters, and operatives in both parties about how women face unique challenges when they campaign for executive office. But when I followed the trail back into the research, the peer-reviewed academic scholarship, I found that this settled opinion is based on old studies and questionable assumptions. For example, in one of the most frequently cited studies, political scientists Leonie Huddy and Nayda Terkildsen gave 297 undergraduates a questionnaire and concluded from it that people preferred candidates for executive office who displayed “masculine personality traits,” and that this finding implied “a bias against candidates who lack[ed] masculine traits.” Because of this bias, they concluded, women were in fact at a disadvantage when they ran for the plum executive offices. But women candidates shouldn’t despair, the two political scientists suggested, as they dispensed advice about how women should present themselves to voters in these types of races. Women could still win, they wrote, “if they convince voters that they possess masculine traits and are competent on ‘male’ policy issues.”
And it turns out that many political consultants followed the advice that women candidates for executive office should present themselves as experienced, qualified, and tough like a man. If you have ever wondered why a woman candidate says again and again that she is the best-qualified candidate, or why she is introduced by a man touting her experience—even when her résumé makes her qualifications abundantly clear—you have this study and its hidden influence over consultants to blame. When Hillary Clinton said in the 2008 campaign, “I am not running as a woman. I am running because I believe I am the best-qualified and experienced person,” she was following this script. I’ve come to think of this as the Lady-Doth-Protest-Too-Much syndrome. Tell someone not to think of an elephant and they can’t help but think of an elephant. (Try it.) That is how our brains work, according to neurolinguistics.
Several recent studies call into question the assumption that America has elected comparatively few women governors because the public thinks women don’t have what it takes. Brooks, in He Runs, She Runs, found that people did not think that women lacked toughness or other leadership qualities, traits that are “typically seen as being especially critical at the executive level.” Likewise, her data showed that people did not judge executive office candidates differently than they judged legislative candidates. Scholars have started to examine other potential reasons for the executive-level gender gap, especially paying more attention to the political and social environment shaping how women fare in gubernatorial campaigns. Valerie O’Regan and Stephen Stambough have found the political parties are nominating women with very different chances of victory. Democrats were more likely to nominate women who had a strong chance of winning, while Republicans were more likely to nominate women as “sacrificial lambs” in contests in which the Republican had little chance of winning. In a separate paper, the two scholars found that the more experience women gubernatorial nominees had in prior elected office, the more likely they were to win. That is hardly a surprising result. Nevertheless, it suggests that the double standard is not the sole or even the primary cause of America’s missing women governors. Political scientist Jason Windett, in a 2011 article, turned the focus to distinct state political environments—the “cultural history and views on gender equality” in each state. Analyzing every case of a woman entering a primary for governor between 1978 and 2008, he found that women were significantly more likely to win a primary or the general election in those states with a history of progressive views on women’s roles and a history of greater gender equity in education, political representation, and workforce participation. This is powerful evidence that changes in gender ideology and women’s representation work together in a positive feedback loop, more egalitarianism leads to more women in office, and vice versa. It is also powerful evidence against the assumption that old views of femininity survive to penalize women candidates in places where gender equity is valued.
Nor does a specific bias against women in executive office show up in public opinion. For example, in a comprehensive survey on women and leadership by the Pew Research Center in 2014, when people were asked if women were better at legislative or executive jobs, more than eight out of ten saw no difference between the two levels of office for women. And by the same margin, they saw no difference between the two levels of office for men.
In short, although there is as yet no consensus in the scholarship, there is plenty of cause to doubt the conventional wisdom that the double standard is to blame for the low numbers of women in elected executive office.
Still, even if Americans ten or twenty years ago believed women were less fit than men to be governor or mayor or president, we can’t simply assume that they continue to believe so now. In 1990, when Huddy and Terkildsen collected data for their study, only five women had ever been elected governor in their own right. As of 2015, twenty-seven states had been led by a woman governor.
There is, however, a bigger problem here that should make us skeptical of any claim that voters prefer candidates with “masculine traits” for executive office. The research is based on personality assessments created in the early 1970s, in which traditional gender stereotypes were baked into the questions themselves.
Here’s how the two most common assessments work. Participants are asked to place themselves on a five-point scale about how well certain adjectives or statements describe themselves, for example, “independent,” “very submissive–very dominant,” or “sensitive to others’ needs.” Each question was coded masculine or feminine, and the total score determined whether you had a “masculine” and “instrumental” personality, or a “feminine” and “expressive-nurturing” personality.
Consider some of the “masculine” traits: strong leader, assertive, competitive, confident, rational, tough, intelligent, power hungry, uncaring.
Now consider some of the “feminine” traits: warm, compassionate, kind, gentle, sensitive, trustworthy, cautious, emotional, weak, incompetent, unintelligent.
Whatever validity these notions might have once had—which is hard to tease out given the circular reasoning in the assessments—it defies common sense to think they are accurate descriptions of how Americans view men and women today. It simply defies common sense to assume that a typical American considers trustworthiness a distinctly feminine trait or rationality a distinctly masculine one, for example.
Ideas about gender have changed rapidly and dramatically, to say the least. Just two presidential elections ago, few could have predicted that the Supreme Court would rule that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right and that the U.S. military would adopt a nondiscrimination policy to protect transgendered service members.
To be sure, we’re not in a postgender age. The central problem here is that too much of the gender scholarship still relies on notions of femininity and masculinity, of “male” leadership and “male” policy areas, that prevailed before the sexual revolution, feminism, and the gay civil rights movement changed America. It’s like using an abacus to calculate string theory. It is time for a new paradigm for analyzing how we think about gender, in general, and women’s leadership, in particular.
Fortunately, in the real world of electoral politics, the old fears and tropes have largely been retired. A new paradigm is being forged in the crucible of political campaigns. “It used to be you had to be tough, and it was almost impossible to be tough as a woman and still be likable. Now you just have to be strong, and you can show strength in a variety of ways,” Democratic consultant Celinda Lake said.
“I get pissed off when I see an ad for one of our candidates, and she’s behind a desk with an American flag, and it’s late at night, and she’s got the office light on. That is just an old model,” Jonathan Parker, former political director at EMILY’s List, said. “Ten years back, I think women felt like they needed to be the business-suited, behind-the-desk type of candidate. They’d portray themselves that way in ads, almost as a way to make them look like leaders. Voters don’t want to see that. They want to see women candidates with groups, talking to people, being regular Joes.” While Parker thought some voters still judged women running for executive office more harshly, he believed it was less the case now. “I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s run for president—showing that a woman could be a totally strong, qualified, and capable executive—helped women running for other executive offices. Republicans and Democrats. I don’t think it was a partisan thing.”
NEARLY EVERY POLITICIAN and operative has a story to tell about the annoyances of leading while female. But if you parse their comments carefully, you get the impression from them that they are eager to move on. Recalling incidents of everyday sexism—the reporter who commented unflatteringly on a dress, the voter who asked about her children—is like kissing babies or posing for selfies on the campaign trail. It comes with the job. Some politicians don’t mind it, some enjoy it, and some tolerate it. (From all appearances and reports, Hillary Clinton genuinely enjoys kissing babies, Jeb Bush genuinely enjoys posing for selfies, and Barack Obama reportedly dislikes the flesh-pressing part of retail politics.) Just as a candidate has nothing to gain by saying no when a voter holds up her phone and asks for a photo, she also has nothing to gain by telling a voter who is convinced that women face a double standard that it just isn’t so.
Consider how Granholm, the first woman governor of Michigan, chose to frame the discussion about women in politics. At the beginning of my interview with her, she said, “Well, as a warning to you about my perspective about women running, I’m often asked, how was it as the first woman attorney general and the first woman governor, and I don’t have a response other than I’ve never been anything else. So, it’s hard for me to know what it would be like otherwise. And I don’t like to look at things in a victim’s frame. I mean, there’s a lot of negativity about politicians in general. But my frame is not the negative side.”
Granholm was not saying that gender was irrelevant to her campaign, but rather that it was not the essential factor; she is deeply involved in several efforts to boost women’s political leadership, because she believes women bring an important and unique perspective to governing. Granholm prevailed in an extremely competitive Democratic primary in 2002, won the general election that year, and was reelected in 2006. (She was termed out in 2010.) “It was a great and momentous race for historic reasons,” she acknowledged. “But it also represented a significant change more than that related to gender or to policy change. It was change in the way of doing business. The previous guy was a very conservative Republican who, they said, ‘ruled with an iron fist.’ He was very closed to outside input. I ran on specific values as a candidate. I said I’m going to be somebody who has five specific values: inclusive, integrity, excellence, creativity, and teamwork. From each of those values flowed certain policies that I would highlight. Obviously, my agenda was different, but I also think that I embodied a fresh perspective on government, a fresh way of serving people.”
“The biggest barrier to electing women really has nothing to do with gender,” EMILY’s List founder Ellen Malcolm said. “The biggest barrier to electing women is the power of incumbency and how difficult it is to put newcomers into office.”
In short, sexism in politics is a paper tiger—showy but toothless.
Still, the presidency could be different.
“When we were rolling out EMILY’s List’s Madam President campaign,” consultant Lisa Grove recalled, “I was backstage at the National Press Club with Stephanie Schriock. Here we were having a press conference to say that America is ready for a woman president. I said to her, ‘I’m trying to figure out what a win is. Is a win today that no one shows up? Because it could be. Seriously, do we really have to have a press conference and roll out data to prove this? Wouldn’t it be a win if no one showed up because it wasn’t news?’ We laughed about it.”
The room was packed, standing room only.
“We were like, ‘Okay, we still have to prove that!’ There’s a part of me that felt we had blown past that.”
“People say it’s no big deal. Well, this country has never ever elected a woman president,” EMILY’s List president Stephanie Schriock told me. “It is a huge deal. It’s not a huge deal in what we are going to campaign on, but we are going to do something that has never happened. It is just like electing Barack Obama. We elected an African American president, and that was a huge deal to every young African American in this country. I don’t think we understand what it is going to mean to women and girls around the world to have a woman president of the United States of America.”