CHAPTER 1

Introduction

"I'm no lady; I'm a member of Congress,and I shall proceed accordingly."

—MARY THERESA NORTON,U.S. HOUSE MEMBER FROM 1925–1951

When Hillary Clinton ran in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries,she seemed to have trouble connecting effectively with the public. Aftermonths of a campaign that emphasized her toughness and experience, sheunderperformed in the polls relative to her biggest competitors. Whilesome observers argued that her strong emphasis on experience causedvoters to think she was "trying too hard to be 'the smartest girl in theroom,'" others maintained that the focus she had adopted was dictatedby the politics of gender: although a male candidate like Barack Obamacould be seen as credible without much past experience, a woman candidatewould not be. And while Clinton's chief strategist emphasized thatshe had to establish herself as a tough "father" figure for the country andnot as the "first mama," she was frequently criticized for being angry,aggressive, and unfeminine and was called an "ice-queen" for her apparentlack of empathy. As a journalist put it, "she presented herself as aperson of strength and conviction, only to be rejected as cold-hearted andunfeminine—as a 'nutcracker.'"

When Clinton's campaign then sought to soften her image through moreintimate gatherings, more compassion-oriented discussions, and more personallyemotive moments to increase her "likeability," that approach seemedto backfire as well. Her campaign started a Web site "TheHillaryIKnow.com"that presented videotaped testimonials by friends and supporters tohighlight Hillary's caring and compassionate side. As the New Hampshireprimaries approached, Clinton's campaign featured stories of mothers ofsick children in a series of emotional ads that were designed to portray herin a more caring light. Clinton's effort to, as one media analyst described it,"run away from [her] tough, kind of bitchy image" ran into difficulties: nolonger too unemotional, she was now pegged by some as being "weak" anda "cry baby." As one journalist put it, "when she did show emotion by cryingon the hustings, she was branded weak, or accused of playing cynicallyto the cameras."

While Clinton attracted a devoted set of core supporters, she also hadhigh unfavorable ratings. With conflicting advice ricocheting from punditsand consultants about how to present herself, she tried a variety ofdifferent approaches for connecting with primary voters. In the end, ofcourse, more Democrats voted for Barack Obama, and she lost the Democraticnomination for president.

Hillary's loss was not the last chance for a woman to appear on a nationalticket in 2008. When Sarah Palin was announced as the vice presidentialcandidate on the McCain ticket for the general election, commentatorszeroed in on her low levels of previous experience. Knowledgegaffes in her infamous Charles Gibson and Katie Couric interviews didnot help Palin's case on the credentials front, and some argued that thescrutiny of her experience was exacerbated because she was a woman.

While campaigning, Palin proclaimed herself to be a "pit bull withlipstick" and tried to claim both toughness and compassion. Palin attemptedto manage the balance between toughness and compassion inpart by surrounding herself with her young family and discussing issuessuch as disability rights while talking tough about issues and her opponents.Like Clinton, Palin attracted a strong cohort of devoted followerswhile suffering very high unfavorable ratings; in other words, she, too,was a polarizing figure.

Many analysts chalked up the electoral failings of Clinton and Palin togood old-fashioned sexism. With headlines such as "How Sexism KilledHillary's Dream," "This Smacks of Double Standards; Women Kept inPlace," and "The 'Bitch' and the 'Ditz': How the Year of the Woman Reinforcedthe Two Most Pernicious Sexist Stereotypes and Actually Set WomenBack," commentators frequently reflected the conventional wisdom aboutwomen in politics: their credentials and campaign behavior are subjected todouble standards that make it harder for them to win political office.

For many, the experience of Clinton and Palin clearly confirmed that thecountry is still not ready to elect a woman president. Others were morecautious in their assessments. For example, Anne Kornblut, journalist andauthor of Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, andWhat It Will Take for a Woman to Win, sought to answer whether thecountry is ready to elect the first woman president by looking back overwhat she described as "a battlefield littered with gender-related detritus,with charges of sexism, the phrases 'she-devil' and 'pit bull with lipstick'and 'lipstick on a pig' and 'likable enough' and 'Caribou Barbie' and 'babymama' scattered everywhere." At various points in her book, Kornblutstrongly implies that gender held back Clinton and Palin, but she ultimatelydemurs from directly making this causal claim owing in large part to theidiosyncrasies of the particular candidates and races in question.

Kornblut's reluctance to tell a causal story about the role of gender in2008 is both understandable and wise. When the campaigns of individualcandidates falter, it is impossible to determine the degree to which anysingle factor—whether it be gender, race, ethnicity, a scandal, or somethingelse entirely—produced the observed outcome with any reasonablelevel of analytical precision. Did Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin fail intheir electoral goals because of gender-related issues or because of otherfactors that pertained to them as individuals or to their respective races?Perhaps it was Palin's political inexperience, socioeconomic background,polarizing ideology, the inherent challenge of running as a Republican in2008, John McCain's difficulty connecting with voters, his weakness oneconomic issues in combination with a rapidly declining economy, or yetanother factor that hampered her, rather than her gender. Perhaps Clintonwas hampered, not by gender, but by (Bill) Clinton fatigue, questionablecampaign management and early spending decisions, exaggerationsof her past history, the voters' desire for a fresh approach, Obama's abilityto connect with younger voters, the Obama team's superior groundorganization, or other such factors.

All races involve unique sets of candidates, candidate behaviors, partisandynamics, and local and national circumstances that can contributeto an electoral outcome. This inherently constrains our ability to look ata given race—or even a given set of races—and draw meaningful conclusionsabout the role of candidates' gender. To produce firm answers aboutthe role of candidate gender in public opinion about campaigns, we needto be able to effectively isolate it. We need to know how gender affectspublic views overall—and how it interacts with candidate behavior—whileholding constant all the other moving parts in a campaign.

In this book, I isolate two dynamics that many see as crucial barriersto the electoral success of women: gender stereotypes and gendered standards.Many have long suspected that the public makes special assumptionsabout, and applies special "rules" to, female candidates, and theexperiences of Palin and Clinton in the 2008 election cycle led to an explosionof interest in this issue. According to the conventional wisdom,just as gender stereotypes have long caused women to be treated differentlyin the workplace and in society more generally, they also make itharder for women to win political office. This book provides the firstsystematic theoretical and empirical analysis of whether gender stereotypesand double standards do, in fact, hold back female candidates onthe campaign trail.

My overall conclusion is an optimistic one: while my results show thatgender stereotypes still do matter in various ways, the analysis is a strikingrefutation of the conventional wisdom about double standards incampaigns. I do not find any evidence that the public makes less favorableunderlying assumptions about female candidates, nor do I find thatthe public has more challenging rules for the behavior of women on thecampaign trail. My findings solve a puzzle that has vexed this field fordecades: if stereotypes and double standards disproportionately hurtwomen candidates as the conventional wisdom posits, then how can wesquare this with findings that demonstrate that women receive vote sharesthat are comparable to those of similarly situated men? If voters penalizewomen in politics for being women, women candidates should wintheir campaigns against men at relatively lower rates. They do not, whichis entirely consistent with my overall finding regarding the insignificanceof damaging gender stereotypes on the campaign trail.

The primary focus of my analysis is at the legislative level, where farmore women run for office. Although this is a common pipeline for futurepresidential candidates, my study cannot definitively rule out that aglass ceiling may remain for women seeking the highest office of the land.That being said, what my findings do reveal is a clear pattern regardingthe qualities of leadership and toughness that are typically seen as beingespecially critical at the executive level: the general public simply doesnot view women legislators as being less capable than men on traits centralto leadership and does not penalize women for acting in a tough and"unfeminine" manner. My study yields some suggestive findings thatolder individuals might hold different views with respect to women andthe presidency; to the extent that this might be the case, the natural processof generational replacement may improve prospects for women atthe presidential level in the United States. More generally, if women weresignificantly held back by gender stereotypes at the presidential leveltoday, it would also be reasonable to expect to find at least some evidenceof that dynamic at other levels, and yet my study finds none. In the end,my analysis is thus very encouraging for the long-term future of womenin politics at all levels.

Why Candidate Gender Matters

Over the course of a dramatic century for women's rights, women haveprogressed from being disenfranchized before 1919 to a much-expandedrole in the political sphere. Casting over half of the votes in the U.S.,women today are a powerful force in terms of deciding who will be elected.14 In fact, some in the media believe that the 2012 elections were definedlargely by the power of women as voters, with headlines like,"Women take stock after historic vote," "How women ruled the 2012election and where the GOP went wrong," and "How women won it."With a sizeable partisan gender gap in voting preferences in play, womenwere critical to putting Barack Obama back in the White House (had itbeen up to men, Mitt Romney would have been president), and werepivotal to a number of sub-presidential wins and losses, as well.

Female candidates have also made great strides. Until quite recently,women occupied a tiny percentage of Congress—a mere 2 percent ofHouse seats and 1 percent of Senate seats in 1950, and just 4 percent ofHouse seats and still 1 percent of Senate seats in 1980; moreover, manyof these early women legislators were in office because they took theplace of departed husbands, and not because they won competitive electionsentirely on their own personal merits. Women are now far morelikely to win office, and to do so without following on their departedhusbands' coattails. And yet the parity that has been achieved for femalevoters is still an elusive goal for female politicians. As of 1990,women held only 7 percent of House seats and 2 percent of Senate seats.Increases in 1992, the "Year of the Woman," bolstered those numbers (to13 and 7 percent, respectively), but by 2011 women held 17 percent ofHouse seats, 17 percent of Senate seats, and six governorships. In the currentera, women hold roughly one-quarter of state legislative seats, withconsiderable variation between states.

The 2012 elections increased the number of women in national officefurther, with a record number of both women House members (81) andwomen senators (20) sworn into office the following January. Severalstates (Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Wisconsin) electedwomen Senators for the first time ever, while New Hampshire elected thefirst-ever all women congressional delegation, along with a woman governorto boot. Describing the 2012 results, Karen Tumulty of the WashingtonPost claimed that, "Twenty years after the election that was heralded asthe 'year of the woman' comes another one that could be called that."

While representing significant progress over a relatively short time, theratios of female to male political leaders are still nowhere near genderparity at any level of American government. Vigorous debates could beundertaken concerning what the "correct" or "best" percentage of womenin office should be: Should it be the percentage of women in the population?The percentage of women relative to men who work—or work fulltime—outside of the home? The relative percentage of women who areinterested in politics? Regardless, most people would likely agree that, byany measure, there is a significant "parity problem" with respect to thedescriptive representation of women, even in the current era.

The descriptive underrepresentation of women in public office mattersin part because it can lead to underrepresentation of women's concernsand opinions. Scholars have shown that women officeholders are betterable to represent the preferences of women and are more likely to sponsorand vote for women-friendly policies. Other scholars have demonstratedthat women legislators more frequently give speeches on issuesthat are thought to be of greater concern to women, such as abortion,gender equity, food stamps, and flex time than were their predecessors.Some scholars argue that the inclusion of more women in legislatureschanges decision making by producing a more cooperative, inclusive, andless hierarchical legislative process. Women with political power alsoempower other women in a symbolic sense by simply being in office:participation, efficacy, and political interest have been found to increasesubstantially among women when they are represented by women. Thiseffect reaches into future generations as well: David Campbell and ChristinaWolbrecht found that adolescent girls had a higher level of plannedpolitical involvement when they were exposed to more highly visiblewomen in office.

Given that a marked gender disparity still exists and is likely to affectboth the political behavior and the substantive representation of women, itis critical to fully investigate the potential causes of this parity problem.

Harmful Stereotypes and Double Standards as a PotentialExplanation for the Parity Problem

The world abounds with information, and humans use a variety of simplificationtools such as gender stereotypes in order to more efficiently (ifnot always accurately) process the regular onslaught of stimuli. Genderstereotypes are commonly used in everyday life; psychological researchreveals that strong gender stereotypes are commonly applied to ordinarypeople, a finding that gives weight to the concern that female candidatesmay be hobbled by double standards. Studies have found that men arecommonly thought to be more decisive, more assertive, more forceful,more ambitious, and less naïve and to have more leadership ability andbusiness sense than women. People also tend to hold strong beliefsabout how men and women should act—for example, women are expectedto be less assertive and forceful and more caring and compassionate—andmen and women tend to be penalized heavily if they act contraryto those gendered expectations. Furthermore, the significance ofgender stereotypes extends beyond normal interpersonal relations in everydaylife: there is considerable evidence that female business leadersface a different—and, by and large, tougher—set of expectations abouttheir qualifications and behavior than do their male peers.

But what about the political realm? Do women running for office facetougher expectations by the public regarding their qualifications and behaviorthan male candidates do? If so, does that contribute to the parityproblem? That is the underlying question this book systematically addresses.As a foundation for investigating this question empirically, wefirst need to understand whether the public makes differing baseline assumptionsabout male and female candidates—that is, whether peoplestereotype male and female candidates based on gender from the start.