In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator working in opposition to the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She misplaced. Individuals would vote for a girl, the considering went, simply not that girl.
In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vp, a former senator, and a former legal professional common additionally working in opposition to Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She additionally misplaced. Individuals would vote for a girl, as soon as once more, simply not that girl.
The occasions of the previous eight years may immediate some to surprise: If Clinton wasn’t adequate, and neither was Harris, will a girl ever be adequate to be president? What sort of a girl would it not take? In line with interviews I performed with six researchers who research gender and politics, sexism was a small however important issue that labored in opposition to Harris. And it’s going to be an issue for any girl who runs for president. “American voters are likely to imagine within the summary that they assist the concept of a girl candidate, however after they get the actual girls in entrance of them, they discover another cause to not just like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State College, instructed me. In 2017, she wrote an article in regards to the lengthy odds confronted by girls working for president. The title? “Each Girl Is the Unsuitable Girl.”
It’s essential to not overstate the position that sexism performed in Harris’s loss. She’s the vp of an unpopular incumbent. Though the U.S. financial system writ giant is objectively sturdy, many citizens really feel pinched by excessive inflation and rates of interest. And after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, Harris had lower than 4 months to make her case to the American public. A really small variety of folks have ever run for president, and, properly, somebody has to lose.
However some persons are biased in opposition to feminine presidential candidates. In 2017, a research discovered that about 13 % of Individuals have been “offended or upset” in regards to the thought of a girl serving as president. In an experiment that very same yr utilizing hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists on the College of Wisconsin at Madison, discovered that voters punish feminine candidates working for president by 2.4 share factors. Which means a hypothetical feminine candidate would get, say, 47 % of the vote, reasonably than 49.4 % if she have been a person. This bias in opposition to feminine presidential candidates, Ono and Burden discovered, was most pronounced amongst males and amongst politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with. (As a result of they don’t really feel strongly hooked up to a celebration, independents depend on different traits of the candidates to make up their thoughts.)
The plain counterpoint is that, though they’re nonetheless underrepresented, girls have attained different sorts of excessive political places of work. We’ve by no means had a feminine president, however girls make up almost a 3rd of Congress. Twelve governors are girls.
The presidency could also be completely different from different elected positions, although. When researchers ask voters to record the traits that they need in a president, they price masculine-coded traits, equivalent to power, as extra essential than feminine-coded ones, equivalent to compassion. “The status and the peak of the workplace contributes to the notion that ladies are simply too huge of a danger to take,” Nichole Bauer, a political-communication professor at Louisiana State College, instructed me.
Masculinity is so essential to the presidency that candidates usually attempt to forged their male opponents as female: Consider George W. Bush portray John Kerry as effete in 2004, and Marco Rubio’s opponents mocking him for his high-heeled boots in 2016. Feminine heads of state are likely to emerge in nations—together with Germany and the UK—which have parliamentary methods, during which leaders are chosen by political events, not by voters.
However girls who behave in masculine-seeming methods are additionally penalized for not being historically female. “For a girl to be seen as presidential, she must be hyper-masculine, however the second she does that, she is condemned by a swath of the inhabitants for violating norms of femininity,” Caroline Heldman, a gender-studies professor at Occidental School, instructed me. “Sarah Palin tried to straddle the masculine-feminine line actually huge, ripping the center out of a moose, and Hillary Clinton barely stepped on both facet of the road along with her pearls and her pants. It simply doesn’t matter. All of them get overwhelmed up in the identical sexist methods.”
Members of Congress, in the meantime, aren’t held to this similar macho commonplace. There are extra of them, they individually have much less energy, and they’re seen as servants of the folks. They’re center managers to the president’s huge boss. And though governors are additionally chief executives, they don’t command a complete nation’s military. Their households aren’t held up as a really perfect American household, with the daddy in cost. As a feminine presidential candidate, “you’re upsetting not simply our thought of what presidents must be,” Anderson stated, “however you’re upsetting a complete bunch of gender norms.”
Of their research, Ono and Burden discovered that the hypothetical feminine candidates weren’t deprived in the event that they have been described as working for Congress reasonably than for president. Burden instructed me he suspects it’s because there has by no means been a feminine president, so voters pressure to think about what a feminine president can be like.
This creates a maddening state of affairs during which a girl can’t get elected president as a result of there’s by no means been a girl elected president. A number of of the researchers I interviewed have been nonetheless uncertain that one would win the presidency anytime quickly. “It will be actually nice to see a girl within the White Home in my lifetime, however I’m very pessimistic,” Heldman stated. Anderson instructed me that nominating one other girl can be a “strategic danger” for both celebration.
Primarily, a feminine candidate must overcome her femaleness as a way to win a presidential race. She must be working with important tailwinds—as a “change” candidate throughout a horrible financial system, say—in order that voters wouldn’t pay an excessive amount of consideration to her gender. That is much like what occurred in 2008: An unpopular Republican was president, the financial system was a wreck, and the preternaturally charismatic Barack Obama stepped into the breach. He turned the primary Black president, and now nobody questions whether or not there might be one other. However we’re nonetheless holding out for the feminine Obama. We is likely to be ready for some time.
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