IN THE ENTIRE sweep of American history, very few women have made a serious attempt to run for president: a grand total of eight. The two major parties have nominated only two women, Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin, for vice president. Hillary Clinton remains the only woman who has won a single state primary—she won many, of course—and the only woman to have stayed in her party’s contest until the end. To put this in perspective, more than twice as many men ran for president in the Republican Party in 2016—that is, in just one party and one year—as all of the women presidential aspirants in our nation’s history.
On its face, these figures suggest an open-and-shut case for the power of the double standard at the presidential level. To be sure, discrimination against women was historically the main cause of women’s political exclusion, as we’ll see in more detail later. But in recent times, why America has never elected a woman president has a lot to do with whether qualified women run. After all, since the mid-1990s, dozens of women have served as governors and senators, the conventional presidential stepping-stones.
One of those qualified women who seriously thought about running for president is retired Texas Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.
“If George Bush hadn’t run for a second term, I think I would have. The timing would have been right. But after he did, then I felt like . . . Well, first of all, I had children by then,” Hutchison told me. She was driving in Dallas after a long day at work, and the thrum of her teenagers could be heard in the background as she recalled her considerations about running for president. “Secondly, I think there was Texas fatigue. I just couldn’t even imagine somebody from Texas winning or making a serious run for president after eight years of a Texan.”
Indeed, she had also weighed running in 2000. Hutchison entered the Senate in 1993, just as women were attaining critical mass there, and to her the fact that they had proven themselves equal with the men allowed her to see herself as a viable and competitive presidential candidate. “After I had been in the Senate for maybe one term, that would have been the right time for me, but then George W. Bush was rising. He certainly got out there. Because his father had been president, people were used to a Bush, and he had broad support from Bush supporters and friends from the past. He had a ready-made operation. That was realistically going to be very powerful.” Hutchison added, “I would never have considered running against him, because we’re friends and I like him. But certainly, when Bush made the decision to run, that affected me greatly.”
In short, “timing was everything,” as she said. In each of the three cycles Hutchison might have been able to mount a successful campaign, she was boxed out by another politician from her own party and her own state. But Hutchison was convinced that had she run, she would not have faced a higher hurdle because she was a woman. “I think if I had run for president, people would have judged me on my policies, and I thought I would be right for America, because my policies would have been right for leading America.”
Americans set a supremely high bar for choosing a president—for good reason, given we’re electing the single most powerful individual on the planet. Every president in the last sixty-five years either held an advanced degree or served in the military; each had deep experience in public service and other professional fields. Still, as many political scientists remind us, when we enter the voting booth, our emotions—not our minds—are in control. Consider that since 1960, according to the American National Election Studies, the candidate rated the highest on personal qualities became president.
America, we are a nation of Goldilocks. We prefer our presidents not too young and not too old, not too cool and not too hot-tempered. We thrill to charisma, and then we mock those who possess the gift. We complain about the superficial tenor of the presidential race, yet voraciously consume news about faux scandals and gaffes. We swoon over the new face and then suffer buyer’s remorse.
In other words, we size up candidates by a host of subjective evaluations about the men and women running for president—about their personality, character, temperament, family life, and style.
Americans say we are ready for a woman president. But can any woman meet our extravagant and paradoxical demands?
SINCE BARACK OBAMA catapulted from the Illinois Senate to the Oval Office in just five short years, pundits and party operatives have been scouting the political farm teams in hopes of finding the next superstar. But history suggests the career paths to the American presidency are narrow. Exactly zero mayors and zero state attorneys general have become president of the United States. Since 1900 only two men who never held prior elected office have become president. One, Herbert Hoover, served in the cabinet, and the other, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and bona fide war hero, led the Allies to victory over Hitler in World War II. A college degree is not a formal requirement for the presidency, but only two presidents in the last 130 years lacked one. The last time Americans elected a sitting member of the House of Representatives to be president, the streets of Washington, DC, were still lit by gas lamps.
In reality, presidential elections before 1900 give little guidance about what is possible for 21st-century would-be candidates. The presidency as we know it is a relatively new phenomenon. “Most 19th-century presidents were rather weak,” Columbia University historian Eric Foner told me. “You had Andrew Jackson who saw the latent power of the office to mobilize popular opinion over and above Congress. You had Lincoln, but he was a war president—war always exalts the power of the office. Politics was more state-oriented, except in wartime, like the Civil War. Politics was more controlled by the political parties, and the president was the creature of the party. There were no primary campaigns like we have today—it saved a lot of money that way. You didn’t have this media focus on the one person.”
The modern presidency, with its candidate-centered politics, bully pulpit, and expanded power, was largely an invention of Theodore Roosevelt. Born into a wealthy New York political dynasty, Theodore was a sickly child and a restless young man who nursed grandiose ambitions. Before he became president in 1901, he had won fame as a cowboy and hero of the Spanish-American War, a big game hunter and a conservationist, an author and explorer. He had held prestigious positions as New York City police commissioner, New York governor, assistant secretary of the navy, and vice president.
What elevated TR to the presidency, however, was not this impressive list of accomplishments. It was an assassin’s bullet. In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated, like Presidents Lincoln and Garfield before him. TR’s career path reveals an underappreciated fact: American presidents have an alarming propensity to vacate the office in the midst of their term. Since 1900, two presidents have been assassinated, two have died in office, and one—Richard Nixon—resigned to avoid indictment. Thanks to political violence and the grim reaper—and in one case, corruption—the vice presidency offers one of the most common paths into the Oval Office.
On the other hand, sitting vice presidents have fared poorly when they have stood for election on their own account. Since 1900, exactly one sitting vice president has won a presidential election in his own right: George H. W. Bush. Three of the four recent vice presidents who tried were defeated: Al Gore in 2000, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Nixon in 1960.
That leaves the two main launching pads for winning presidential campaigns: the Senate and the governor’s office of any one of the fifty states. Since 1900, three sitting senators have run for president and won: Warren G. Harding, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama. Six governors have won the presidency in this time, including four of our six most recent presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.
One job that has been a dead-end on the path to the White House is CEO. In recent times, business titans who have never held elected office have run for president, promising they could rescue America from professional politicians. In 2016, real estate mogul Donald Trump and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company, entered the GOP primary with essentially the same rationale as past hopefuls Ross Perot and Steve Forbes had offered. As Fiorina put it in her campaign tagline, “Our Founders never imagined a government led by career politicians. It’s time to put a citizen leader in the White House.” So far, Americans have not bought the CEO’s pitch, and despite Trump’s and Fiorina’s strong performances in early polls of Republican 2016 voters, that is unlikely to change in the near future.
Keeping in mind this robust historical pattern, at any given time there are only roughly 200 people in the nation with the credentials to mount a credible presidential run: current and recent senators, governors, and cabinet members.
To be sure, women are vastly outnumbered among this elite group. Nevertheless, there are currently plenty of women with the right qualifications and experience to compete at the exalted presidential level. In 2016, twenty women serve in the Senate, and dozens more are current or recent governors or cabinet officers. Nearly every election cycle, women’s numbers in these high offices increase—albeit not as rapidly as many would hope.
In short, women make up a sufficient proportion of the presidential pool. But when every competitive presidential contender has more or less the same qualifications and experience, it takes more than the right résumé to win. It takes the right stuff.
“THERE IS AN intangible in campaigns,” Democratic consultant Rose Kapolczynski said. “Voting is an emotional decision, so people are voting for a person who they like, who they trust, who they think shares their values and will fight for them. I’m very research- and data-driven, but I also believe that grassroots excitement around a campaign can influence that emotional decision. Is it the only way people make decisions? No, but it can help.”
“The ‘it factor’ matters more and more as politics becomes more about the ten-second sound bite,” Bettina Duval said. Duval is a major donor to pro-choice, progressive Democratic women. When we spoke, U.S. senator Barbara Boxer had just announced her retirement, and California attorney general Kamala Harris had already announced she would run for Boxer’s seat. Duval recalled that when she first met Harris, Harris was an obscure San Francisco district attorney, running for attorney general, and polling at 2 percent. Harris ultimately defeated the Republican frontrunner in the race, becoming California’s first woman, African American, and Indian American attorney general. “When I first met Kamala, she just had it. What is that ‘it’? I knew she was going to be a winner,” Duval said. “I went to her swearing in and it was an electric room. Why is that? She was an attractive woman, she spoke very well, with passion—a little bit too long but nobody cared.” I asked her how much she thought charisma—the “intangibles,” to use Kapolczynski’s word—mattered for candidates. “I think people want to reach out and touch a candidate. It matters that you are warm and make people comfortable. You have to have a sense of humor. You don’t have to be an amazing beauty to run for office. I don’t think it matters if you’re fat or thin or what color your hair is, you just have to look like you are pulled together. You have to be able to articulate why you are running, and truly believe in what your issues are. So, the charisma component is important, but it is the whole package that matters.”
The view of Kapolczynski and Duval, who are in the business of getting candidates elected, is supported by a significant body of scholarly research. “The data from political science are crystal-clear: People vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best arguments,” Drew Westen, an Emory University psychology professor, wrote in his influential 2007 book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. “The political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a reasoned decision.” Westen elaborated, “We are not moved by leaders with whom we do not feel an emotional resonance. We do not find policies worth debating if they don’t touch on the emotional implications for ourselves, our families, or things we hold dear. From the standpoint of research in neuroscience, the more purely ‘rational’ an appeal, the less it is likely to activate the emotion circuits that regulate voting behavior.”
Not all experts agree, however, that voters’ feelings about presidential candidates influence the outcome of elections. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed public opinion data on the six presidential elections that took place between 1980 and 2000 and concluded that assessments of personality traits rarely influenced presidential election outcomes, even though there were modest effects on the vote share. In five of the six cases, how positively voters assessed the candidates’ character and personality did not affect the outcome of the election.
The conclusion of this study, however, would likely strike panic into anyone with skin in the electoral game, given the one election when personality did matter. In 2000, George W. Bush registered a half-point advantage over Al Gore in voters’ estimation of the two candidates’ personal traits and character. Bartels conceded that in such a close election the slightly more positive feelings voters held about Bush were “quite probably, large enough to be decisive.” Another way of looking at this is to note that in one out of six elections, voters’ assessment of the character and personality of the two major party candidates determined who would become president of the United States.
“Al Gore changed the whole world because the poor guy was stiff,” Eleanor Smeal, who has spent decades working on campaigns, scoffed. “Politics is a retail business. Personality matters. You’ve got to be good on television. You have to have a warm personality. If you don’t, go be the campaign manager or something.”
WHEN PEOPLE THINK about the intangibles that factor into voters’ judgments and how women seem to face different standards, it’s common to rail against the media and its obsession with women’s looks, appearance, and dress. Former governor Jennifer Granholm, who reporters have called “gorgeous” and “charismatic,” agreed that women receive more attention about their hair, their clothes, and their makeup, but it didn’t faze her. “That just is, that’s our world. Every TV show you see reinforces that, so why wouldn’t you apply that to women in politics?” And because politicians were in the public eye more often, they faced it more than women in other professions did. “When you’re out there and the wind is blowing your hair straight up, and you have to make sure your skirt isn’t blowing up, and your opponents take that picture and make a commercial out of it saying, ‘Look! The Wicked Witch of the West!’ But they would be doing that with a man too. Unflattering photos are unflattering photos no matter what,” she said with a laugh.
Granholm made an important point, one that people who cry sexism whenever a woman’s appearance is mentioned almost always neglect. The public spotlight shines harshly on men too. Jeb Bush’s Paleo diet earned its own New York Times story. Kentucky Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was routinely likened to a turtle by comedian Jon Stewart on the popular the Daily Show. Vice president Joe Biden’s cosmetic enhancements were dramatic enough that a New Yorker fact-checker let the following passage by reporter Evan Osnos stand: “When [Biden] was thirty years old, he became one of the youngest senators in history, and he has parted with youth begrudgingly. . . . At seventy-one, with his hairline reforested and his forehead looking becalmed, Biden projects the glow of a grandfather just back from the gym, which is often the case.” And then, of course, there was Donald Trump’s hair.
Men with designs on the presidency have long known that vigor and physical attractiveness are part of what they had to sell. FDR, a tall and striking man before he was nearly paralyzed by polio, would not allow himself to be photographed sitting in his wheelchair. JFK, a handsome philanderer who revolutionized men’s fashion, deliberately lied about his health. Given access to hitherto private papers, historian Robert Dallek wrote, “The lifelong health problems of John F. Kennedy constitute one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history—no surprise, because if the extent of those problems had been revealed while he was alive, his presidential ambitions would likely have been dashed.” Ronald Reagan was an actual Hollywood leading man. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, was once named to People magazine’s list of the “Fifty Most Beautiful People.”
So if we want to know if women face a double standard regarding their physical appearance, we need to look at the whole landscape. What we then see is that men too are under the media’s gaze, and as we’ve seen, on average equally so. It also becomes apparent that men who run for office are highly conscious of their physical appearance.
But the real question is, do looks matter to voters?
“The best available evidence says that politicians don’t get elected because of their good looks,” Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos wrote in the Washington Post during the 2012 presidential election, when the media was chattering about how handsome Romney was. (On a candidate attractiveness rating system that Enos and his colleagues Matthew Atkinson and Seth Hill developed, Romney scored in the 99th percentile.) By comparison, Joe Biden scored in the 62nd percentile, and Sarah Palin in the 95th. An analysis by the three scholars on every Senate election between 1990 and 2006 found that good looks never tipped a Senate election. It wasn’t for lack of trying by parties and candidates. In competitive races, the out-party tended to run an above-average looking challenger to the incumbent, but that factor did not influence who won or lost. What about the much-touted studies that showed a relationship? Enos and his colleagues argued that those famous studies had left out important variables related to the particular election context and had erroneously found a cause-and-effect relationship where none existed. (Or to put it in statistical lingo, the correlation between looks and election outcome was probably spurious.) Enos wrote, “This isn’t surprising: Politics and voting are greatly affected by factors such as partisanship, the economy, campaigning, and even policy—all of which leave little room for voters to cast votes based on politicians’ looks.” When it comes to the ultimate test—winning or losing—appearance does not matter.
Could it be instead that expectations about a woman’s role, rather than how a woman should look, is the hurdle that knocks would-be women presidents off the ladder to the Oval Office?
EVEN IF AMERICANS see women in general as equally qualified as men to hold executive-level office, as we have seen, do we nevertheless hold candidates who are mothers to a different standard than candidates who are fathers?
There is no question that we used to. Amusing evidence of this double standard regarding mothers and fathers can be found in Theodore White’s classic book about the presidential race, The Making of the President 1960. The fact that John F. Kennedy would be parenting a two-month-old on the day he moved into the White House merited just five words in White’s 382-page book. “JFK was tense, it seemed, as he voted, thronged and jostled by [reporters],” White wrote, “only now his wife was with him in the press, and he was uncomfortable at how the pushing might affect her, she being eight months pregnant.”
In our own lives, Americans have strayed far from the traditional family model of husband, wife, and children. Half of all marriages end in divorce; 41 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers; a record percentage of American adults are single. Nevertheless we demand that POTUS and FLOTUS stage the old-time show. Every president but one in American history was married. (The perpetual bachelor was James Buchanan who, for sixteen years, shared a Washington DC home with the also unmarried Alabama senator William Rufus Devane King.) Ronald Reagan broke the divorce barrier but was in a devoted second marriage. Even as late as 2015, GOP presidential candidate Senator Lindsey Graham found himself having to defend his status as a single man. One fellow Republican senator was caught on a hot mic referring to Graham as “a bro with no ho.” Graham, facing days of unflattering headlines, protested that he was not “defective” because he was not married. “I don’t think there’s anything in the Constitution that says single people need not apply for president. And if it bothers some people, then they won’t vote for me. I offer what I offer.” In the last 100 years, every president has had children, many of whom were raised in the White House.
Given the fact that women still perform the lion’s share of parenting, does a qualified woman who is also a mother of school-aged children have a chance to be president? Given cultural biases about proper gender roles, could a woman who was single or childless by choice win the affection of voters in a presidential contest?
“People would ask me, ‘How can you do this as a mother of three?’” Granholm told me. “They never would have asked my predecessor, who had young triplets at home, because of course they knew that his wife was going to be doing that.”
For Granholm, the key to putting those questions to rest began with the conscious choice she and her husband had made about how to share parenting responsibilities. After asking themselves which of them would be a better primary parent, Granholm said, he won hands down. “He is somebody who could spend hours staring at a baby. He plays music. He takes his time. He smells the roses. I make the lists. I’m like, ‘Come on, come on, come on. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ If you looked at our personality traits on paper, you would pick him to be the one to stay at home, for sure.” Granholm continued, “I certainly would never have run for office without that support, without my husband being willing to be the primary caregiver at home. There’s no way I would have run. But once people knew that we had taken care of our arrangements at home, there was not a question. Ever.”
In the 1990s, Granholm and her husband’s division of parenting labor was uncommon, but it is less so now. Currently, women are the primary or sole breadwinner in 40 percent of American households. Fathers spend triple the amount of time on child care now than they did in the 1960s and they make up 16 percent of stay-at-home parents. Two data points particularly underscore the shifts in thinking and values accompanying these day-to-day changes in behavior. Among fathers in dual-earner households, six in ten report feeling a work-family conflict, a 71 percent increase since 1977. In a large survey of millennials, the Public Religion Research Institute found that two-thirds of millennials did not think that family life suffered if women worked full-time. More of a problem, in their view, were men who concentrated too much on work.
In short, a host of old assumptions about women, work, motherhood, and the breadwinner husband have fallen. New ideals of involved fatherhood and a saner balance of family and work for men and women both has taken root, especially among couples in their twenties and thirties.
Increasingly, women leaders across the political spectrum are seamlessly incorporating motherhood into their public personas. Republican Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the highest-ranking woman in the GOP House leadership, proudly claims in her official congressional biography that she is “the only Member of Congress in history to give birth three times while in office.” Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand has written about how she spent the day she went into labor in an hours-long Senate Armed Services Committee meeting. Gillibrand’s husband works in New York City, while the family’s main home is in DC, and Gillibrand is essentially the lead parent during her workweek. In contrast, Republican senator Kelly Ayotte, a mother of two, commutes back and forth to work in DC, while her husband stays with the children at the family’s New Hampshire home during the workweek.
While I heard from some older Republican women leaders a more conventional expectation that women were naturally the primary parent, it soon became apparent that to the extent that there is any divide on this question, it is generational, not partisan or ideological. NARAL president Ilyse Hogue, a progressive and a Democrat, was six months pregnant with twins when we spoke. “There is no presumption in my marriage that I am going to be the one to stay home. If anything, this experience has made my husband way more outraged about the lack of paternity leave,” she said. Margaret Hoover, a conservative and a Republican, concurred. “My husband’s way more involved with our eighteen-month-old than my dad was ever involved. But we’re also a split partisan household. Maybe because I didn’t marry a Republican I have a more involved husband, I don’t know,” she laughed. “But I do think it’s generational. I think there’s far more cooperation and collaboration in all areas of family than previously.”
On both ends of the electoral equation—candidates and voters—old concerns about women balancing political office and motherhood appear to have waned. Political scientists Richard Fox and Jennifer Lawless found, contrary to their anticipated result, that the challenge of balancing family and work is not deterring women from running for office, because American women in all fields have so fully integrated the expectation of balancing work and motherhood. (It’s worth a reminder that the United States is the only advanced nation without guaranteed paid maternity leave.) Although some politicians and consultants report that voters question women candidates about who is taking care of their children, I found no academic study that suggests mothers are penalized at the polls. It seems that like many other examples of everyday sexism, these are isolated events that have no systematic effect on women’s chances of election.
Likewise, many political professionals believe that voters have become less judgmental about the family choices women politicians make. “People are more respectful of people’s private decisions about how to manage their personal affairs,” Granholm said. “It used to be you had to hide your family, but now you can run with your family in a more 360-degree candidacy,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said. “People still worry if you have young kids, but it’s a lot easier than it was.” Others think even that has changed. “If I was advising someone, I wouldn’t be worried about young children,” Eleanor Smeal said. “It used to be harmful, but it’s not anymore. Pat Schroeder, who had a baby while she was in the House, told me that once you’re in there and you do the job, you’re no longer hypothetical, you’re a person. All politics is personal. Once you’re in, people forget that other stuff and see you as a person.”
That issue would not be raised in 2016, as no woman running for president had children at home. Instead, another assumption about how the double standard hurt women would be put to the test.
In a piece titled “Clinton Is Too Old to Run,” Republican syndicated columnist Linda Chavez wrote, “Clinton will be sixty-nine in 2016—the same age as Ronald Reagan was in 1980 when he ran and won. But age was kinder to Reagan, as it often is to men.” (Chavez had worked in Reagan’s White House and had run for Senate and lost to Democrat Barbara Mikulski in 1986.) “Reagan managed to convey energy and vigor by riding horseback and chopping wood in his leisure time and engaging with voters and debating on the campaign trail. Clinton doesn’t seem to have that same gift. Sure, it’s not fair that women are judged more harshly on age—but it probably matters in an election, even if few people are willing to say so.”
Was she right that age hurt a woman more than it did a man? On one hand, the three most recent American presidents were an average age of forty-nine at the time of their election. So any presidential candidate, man or woman, who was significantly older than this average could reasonably worry about falling victim to age-based judgments. It was an issue John McCain’s 2008 campaign confronted—and arguably mishandled. On the other hand, calling attention to a woman’s age is such a well-worn trope of crude sexism that to do so could easily backfire. Early in the 2016 campaign, GOP operatives warned Republicans to avoid talking about Clinton’s age. When GOP candidate Rand Paul said, “It’s a rigorous physical ordeal, I think, to be able to campaign for the presidency,” and McConnell, age seventy-three, said Hillary seemed like a cast member of Golden Girls (a syndicated sitcom about four older women), they were roundly denounced for sexism.
However, in Clinton’s case, the subtext of these sorts of remarks was more politically significant. Clinton’s age wasn’t really the main issue. Rather, McConnell, Paul, and others were reminding voters that she had spent two decades in the national spotlight. And for a younger opponent, like the boyish-looking, fifty-two-year-old, one-term senator Rand Paul, activating negative associations about age could establish a useful contrast, one that not incidentally recast his own deficits—a lack of experience and seasoning—as strengths. Think of it in Westen’s terms of activating the neuronal pathways to trigger a thought that you might not want to state explicitly. Seen from this angle, Republicans were saying that Clinton wasn’t so much old as old news. She was the status quo, not the future—a theme Jeb Bush, son of a president, a two-term governor, and a whopping six years younger than Clinton, hammered home in his presidential campaign announcement speech.
Still, Clinton’s apparent predicament was enough to make a second-wave feminist’s head spin. For years it had been said that America had never elected a woman president because no woman had the experience to be a serious contender. And now the potential first woman president had too much experience to be president? Journalists and pundits often speculated that Clinton’s lack of freshness should make Democrats panic about their odds of holding the White House.
Would Clinton falter in the race because her vast experience had made her too familiar to voters? “People yin and yang, they alternate between change and experience, experience and change,” Democratic consultant Celinda Lake told me. “They’ve also concluded, rightly or wrongly, that Barack Obama didn’t have enough seasoning and that he’s had trouble getting things done, and that maybe it is time for someone who is more seasoned and knows how to get things done. In 2008, the mood was the opposite of Hillary Clinton. I think in 2016 the mood will be exactly in her direction.” Only time would tell if Lake’s prediction about the mood of the country in 2016 was right. Nonetheless, she was onto something. Talk of Clinton’s biological age was a proxy for the quadrennial choice between change and experience, not a case of gender-based bias. Clinton’s age probably didn’t matter, and it certainly mattered no more for her than it would for a man.
Not to mention that 69 percent of millennials, according to a Pew survey earlier that year, thought Hillary was in her fifties or younger.
IN THE FALL of 2007, Hillary Clinton led every one of the many talented men in the Democratic primary on almost every measure related to leadership and competence. She had the qualifications and experience to match any major party candidate in recent history. She had topped Gallup’s ranking of the Most Admired Woman in the world in nine of the prior ten years. But she fell short on one measure: Voters rated her less inspiring than Obama.
That 2007 poll validated a feeling many women harbor, that a woman faces a natural disadvantage on the exalted stage of a presidential election. Most voters never meet a presidential candidate in person, and their impressions of the candidates are formed largely through mediated experiences, especially the big speech to an audience of thousands or tens of thousands. And what makes the impression is not just ideas, it’s how candidates present themselves, and those ineffable qualities are something that can’t be measured and quantified. When men quite literally speak in a more commanding voice, can women hope to compete?
“When I taught speech writing at Harvard and American University, one of the segments that I always did was about women candidates. And I always used Hillary as an example,” Chriss Winston, President George H. W. Bush’s lead speech writer and the first woman ever to lead the White House speechwriting office, told me. “Are women different from men, style-wise or rhetorically? There are differences between men and women. Some are physiological differences and that is just reality. There are exceptions. There was Barbara Jordan, who was a powerful, amazing woman speaker. There have been other women who have that ability to really deliver. I think Elizabeth Warren is pretty good. I happen to think she is just one of the absolute worst ideologues ever, but looking at it just as someone who can deliver a message in a way that people respond to I think she’s pretty good. But there are differences. I do think women have some disadvantages that men don’t have. The timbre of our voices is physically different. It doesn’t project as well. It sounds thin if you really try and push the emotion or power.” Winston herself has a lovely, sonorous voice.
“There’s a difference between projecting your voice and raising your voice, where you can really sound harsh and very atonal. Hillary Clinton I think is an example of someone who has struggled with this.” (When Winston and I spoke, Clinton had not yet launched her 2016 campaign, and her evaluation was based on the 2008 bid.) Although Clinton delivered formal speeches well, Winston continued, “You can look at some of the clips of Hillary. She does what a lot of women speakers do when they’re in a situation like a political rally, when they’re going out to rally the troops. As women try to pack more power and emotion into their words, their voices tend to rise. There are some men who do this too, but it is more so I think with women, and Hillary is an absolutely prime example. As Clinton would get revved up, her voice would go up and by the time she was done it was like a half scream. It was not good TV. It was not good sound. I noticed that by the end of the 2008 campaign, she was much, much better than she was at the beginning. I think she had some speech coaching. The voice rising and so on is something as a woman you have to be aware of.” Still, she emphasized, every woman’s voice was different, and some men also tended to shout and scream when they got worked up. Moreover, some speeches were poorly written and no one could do much with a “colorless speech.” Ultimately, she concluded, it wasn’t a huge factor in a campaign. “It is just that you have to be aware of it.”
While there were physiological gender differences, Winston believed they only went so far in explaining why some candidates were so good and some weren’t. “Some people simply are not good at communicating their emotions,” she said. “Mitt Romney wasn’t great at it. Ronald Reagan was great. Some people are just like Bill Clinton, the guy is awesome. He can deliver a speech like nobody’s business. He has you in the palm of his hand. He’s amazing. George W. Bush? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. His father? Same thing. George H. W. Bush could deliver a good speech, but most of the time, he just didn’t pay attention to it,” Winston laughed. “That’s the truth. When he decided it really was an important speech, he could deliver it fine. He just never spent the time he needed to on most speeches to really deliver them well.”
In other words, no one could spin gold from the dross of a badly written speech, practice was essential to competent delivery, but what captivated people was something ineffable in the delivery. Unlike national GDP and the unemployment rate, you can’t quantify the ‘it’ factor. But maybe you can break it down into its key ingredients. I asked John Neffinger, communications strategist and author of Compelling People, a book about communications and leadership, what was it that impressed audiences or left them unmoved.
“There is actual science that shows that when me meet someone, we size them up quickly. We have a giant occipital lobe in the back of our head,” he said, touching the nape of his neck. “We take in visual signals through it, and our visual neurons are wired to process facial expression, posture, all of these kinds of nonverbal cues.” Human beings process nonverbal information in milliseconds. Most of that judgment—80 percent, according to a scientist who measured it—was based on two dimensions, Neffinger explained. “The science suggests we are looking for two signals: first warmth and second strength. There is a little bit of warmth primacy as we size up people.”
Effective and charismatic leaders, Neffinger and his coauthor Matthew Kohut argue in their book, embody an exquisite balance between strength and warmth. If strength is an irreducible component of leadership, and nonverbals are the key signals of strength people use to assess a person’s leadership, at a physiological level, is it simply more difficult for women to clear the bar? “Remember, John Kerry lost even though he was taller than almost everyone. So it’s not an ironclad rule,” he answered, explaining that people perceive physiological characteristics in a relational, not an absolute way. A tall man who slouches, such as Kerry, is perceived to be lacking in strength. On the other hand, a woman of just average height can be perceived to be strong, as long as her voice registered in the midrange proportional to her height. “What people are trying to suss out is how you feel on the inside. If you feel assertive and confident and determined, that is going to show in your voice just by where in your range you are speaking.”
This theory of the Goldilocks zone allows us to drill down on Winston’s criticism of women’s tendency to go high, thin, and shouty. Those qualities simply don’t project confidence, resolve, determination, and assertiveness—traits any person with vast power in their hands must possess. Recent research confirms our intuitive understanding of the effect certain voices have on people, as well as Winston and Neffinger’s complementary takes on public speaking. In an article titled appropriately “The Sound of Power,” three psychologists found that people who speak in a voice that is steadier in pitch yet varied in volume are perceived to hold more authority and a higher rank than those whose voices waver and sound strained. They also found, as did Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy (with whom Neffinger has worked), that imagining oneself to be powerful or striking a power pose—”faking it,” as Cuddy put it in her immensely popular TED Talk—can enhance our feelings of our own power and change how powerful others perceive us to be.
But are women damned if they do and damned if they don’t? My conversation with Neffinger took place a few weeks before Clinton announced her candidacy, and Neffinger assessed Clinton somewhat differently than Winston had. “Hillary projects tons of strength. Her posture is great. There is something she does that is more subtle, but it is an incredibly strong nonverbal cue. The lay term for it is poise. She is one of the leading examples of this in public life. It demonstrates control of your body in space and it projects a lot of strength,” he said. But at the same time, he cautioned, such composure can feel intimidating. Strength and warmth tend to work like a seesaw: when one goes up, the other goes down, and rarely do they stay balanced. Nonverbal strength displays can create the impression that a person lacks warmth, particularly if that person was a woman, Neffinger believes. So Clinton’s poise and composure, a personal strength and a display of strength, were sending mixed messages. Neffinger felt that men were given more latitude than women to stretch beyond old gender stereotypes—that a man suffered less of a hit if he showed warmth than a woman did if she showed a lot of strength. In other words, unlike Brooks who concluded that voters judge women politicians as “leaders, not ladies,” Neffinger thought women still faced something of a double bind. Although, he observed, “It is all changing, and mostly by example. The stereotypes suggest certain ways, and you’re comfortable with them. You’re not comfortable when you see them mixed and matched. As you see mixing and matching happen successfully, it will rewire the stereotypes. The culture is changing in a way that makes it possible for us to envision a woman president.”
We’ll see that Clinton’s projection of strength was as much a campaign strategy as it was a reflection of her authentic self. But she is not unique on this score. All candidates craft a public persona, and it is the performance of a “self,” not necessarily the true “self,” that touches us as voters. Consider the case of President Ronald Reagan, known in his day as the “Great Communicator.” In 1937, Warner Bros. signed Reagan, an aspiring actor, to a film contract specifically because of his appealing baritone voice, Reagan’s biographer Edmund Morris wrote in a New Yorker profile. Fans loved it so much they wrote letters saying, “You have the most wonderful voice in pictures.” Reagan was a natural actor, in appearance and presence. “Reagan never required makeup, even when he was a movie actor. He didn’t sweat under hot lights: he basked in them.” But according to Morris, Reagan felt little connection to anyone but his wife Nancy, even to his own children. “Reagan’s scrupulously kept presidential diary is remarkable for a near-total lack of interest in people as individuals. In all its half million or so words, I did not find any affectionate remark about his children.”
Again, it’s worth emphasizing, little of this is playing out at a conscious level. Not only are we making nonrational snap judgments based on nonverbal cues about a speaker’s character as shown by certain traits, but all it takes to thrill us, move us, and touch us is a good performance of heartfelt feeling.
Still, our expectations for the big presidential speech have been calibrated to the masculine persona, which is not surprising, given that historically men have been the only ones on stage. In this one area, women on average do appear to start from a biologically sex-based disadvantage. But it is far from an insuperable obstacle to victory. Rare talents like Obama or Reagan or Bill Clinton, to be sure, will always have an edge on the presidential campaign trail, but only a handful of individuals of this caliber have emerged in American politics in the last forty years. Most presidential candidates—both men and women—are distinctly average public speakers, and practice and training can go a long way to improving performance for any candidate. More importantly, the stump speech to a large crowd is simply becoming less important. Technological advances in social media and changes in how Americans consume culture and news have created new platforms for candidates to show off their “it factor” and cultivate an intimate bond with voters. And in this virtual world, height, voice, and the gendered body itself are immaterial.
That doesn’t mean that warmth, strength, likability, and all those other ineffable qualities become irrelevant. As Neffinger and I talked more about how people’s perceptions of candidates’ character might influence their vote choice, Neffinger offered, “I have this notion of the lifestyle voter who tunes in every four years. Yeah, maybe they care about policy, but it’s hard to connect a vote to a policy outcome. What is easier to connect is that one of these two characters is going to be on my television every day for at least the next four years. I’m going to have to talk to my friends about them. I’m going to have to talk to my kids about them. And that’s going to be a more or less pleasant experience depending on how they present themselves. That is part of the deal, part of the assessment. We are looking for leadership characteristics and we’re judging on character.”
Or as Westen put it, winning politicians “understand what the philosopher David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around.”
BY 2016, WAS America ready to elect a woman president?
“In the same way that President Obama always had a slice of the electorate who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black president, Clinton will have a slice of the electorate who cannot bring themselves to vote for a woman president,” Granholm said. But, she underscored, the numbers of those holdouts were shrinking quickly. “I think it will be to her advantage and not to her detriment.”
Women candidates at all levels remain targets of the occasional gender-based attack, to be sure, but the best evidence tells us that sexism has no power to influence the outcome of elections.
Women who can compete at this exalted level believe that the double standard has minimal impact on their chances. Hutchison, who said she ultimately decided not to run for president because the Bush factor, Texas fatigue, and family obligations all made it untenable to do so when the time was ripe for her, felt confident that being a woman would not have been an obstacle. “After I had a term in the Senate and virtually no opposition running for reelection, I felt like people did not think of me as a woman senator anymore. People thought of me as a senator representing Texas. I didn’t ever feel again like I had to prove myself in a different way.”
Hutchison, the first woman ever elected to the Texas state legislature and a U.S. senator for more than two decades, believed that voters would have judged her on her policies. Realistically, they also would have viewed her through their partisan sympathies and antipathies, their ideological views, and a host of ineffable qualities as well. But Hutchison’s point stood. Voters apply those same judgments to all presidential candidates, regardless of their gender.
Before casting votes on the second Tuesday of November every four years, American men and women have already sized up the Republican and Democratic nominees by standards that are partisan, contradictory, arbitrary, superficial, and finally, in many ways, tangential to the job requirements. Fortunately, the pool of potential candidates has been winnowed down through a challenging and merciless climb up the professional career ladder.
We feel, therefore we vote. When we step into the booth to mark our ballot, our lizard brain scampers out. To vote is as much an emotional act as it is a rational decision, particularly when we are choosing a president.
It is a touch deflating to contemplate that the most important decision in America’s great democracy plays out like a nationwide election for homecoming king. But there is a silver lining to our shallowness. American voters subject the men and women who want to be president to the same absurd measures.
The double standard is dead.