Voters will tend to disfavor a political candidate who seems “power hungry,” but only when that candidate is female, a new study suggests.
The research aimed to address why, decades after women have won voting rights throughout the democratic world, there are still relatively few female politicians. In the United States, just over one-sixth of members of Congress are women, though the current number is a record high. U.S. women won the right to vote in 1920.
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During her political career, the polarizing figure of current U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has often suffered accusations of being power hungry. (Photo courtesy U.S. State Dept.)
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A oft-mentioned vulnerability in some female politicians has been a perception of excessive ambition. A much discussed case Hillary Rodham Clinton; the Los Angeles Times warned in 2007, for example, that a widespread view of her as “coldly ambitious” might “doom her presidential campaign.”
The researchers, Tyler Okimoto and Victoria Brescoll of the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Conn., found in their study that such perceptions hurt female candidates in voters’ eyes, while male candidates tend to be let off the hook for the same perceived characteristic.
This may be because power-seeking goes against common stereotypes about females, but not those about males, the researchers said. They added that their findings might also be relevant to females in professions besides politics.
“Cultural stereotypes depict women in general as being communal—they are sensitive, warm, caring, and concerned about others. In contrast, men are seen as agentic—they are dominant, assertive, and competitive,” the researchers wrote in their study, published in the June 2 advance online issue of the research journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
“Unlike male politicians, we [found] evidence that female politicians are expected to live up to a prescribed level of communality and that failure to meet those communal standards elicits backlash.” Women who buck the stereotype “are often depicted as ‘bitchy,’ ‘selfish,’ ‘ice-queens,’ and ‘battle-axes’,” Okimoto and Brescoll wrote, citing past research.
Okimoto and Brescoll carried out two surveys to analyze how the stereotypes affect politicians.
In the first, survey participants were given biographies of a fictional female and male politician. All participants received the same two biographies, but for half the participants, the researchers switched around which one referred to the female and which to the male. The participants were then asked to “vote” for one of the two.
Although the female did as well as the male in general, the female did worse among voters who rated her more emphatically as someone with “a clear desire for power and status,” the investigators found.
In a second experiment, participants again read biographies of a fictional politician. In half of the biographies, the politician had the first name Ann, and in half, John. The biographies were further subdivided so that half of them—for both the male and female case—had extra information portraying the candidate as an unabashed power-seeker. Other than these changes, all biographies were identical.
The extra information was that a newspaper had described the candidate as “one of the most ambitious” in the state, and that the candidate him- or herself had said: “being hungry is everything... it’s key to gaining influence in politics.”
Again, voters punished candidate “Ann,” but not “John,” after reading biographies with this information, the researchers found. Moreover, in both surveys, female “voters” acted the same way as male “voters” with regard to punishing the ambitious Ann. Overall, Ann still fared no worse than John, possibly in part because educated white women were overrepresented in the surveyed group, the investigators wrote.
It’s not clear how female politicians might counter biases and get a fairer shot in politics, said Okimoto. An increased number of women politicians alone may not reverse the prejudice, they argued, because survey results showed that the bias stems from “moral” views of how women should act—not just in impressions about how they typically do.
It may be that simply bringing the bias to light will help encourage people to avoid it, the investigators suggested. Another possibility is that “careful impression management [by candidates] may aid in overcoming the barriers posed by this gender bias,” Okimoto wrote in an email. Brescoll is currently researching how successful female politicians manage such impressions. It’s “a difficult question,” Okimoto added.
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