Do voters punish ambitious women? Tracking a gendered backlash toward the 2020 democratic presidential contenders

Bauer, Nichole M.; Harman, Moriah; Russell, Erica B.

doi:10.1007/s11109-022-09805-2

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Outside of the laboratory, research has found that women who were more dominant on the Turkish legislative floor were significantly less likely to get renominated and promoted in their party ranks, whilst the reverse was true for men 12 . Other research has revealed that in the first month of the 2020 U.S. democratic presidential primaries, female (vs. male) presidential contenders received less positive ratings on warmth and likability, though this effect diminished over time 13 .…”

Section: Backlash Theorymentioning

confidence: 98%

Twitter misogyny associated with Hillary Clinton increased throughout the 2016 U.S. election campaign

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Alshaabi

Arnold

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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Online misogyny has become a fixture in female politicians’ lives. Backlash theory suggests that it may represent a threat response prompted by female politicians’ counterstereotypical, power-seeking behaviors. We investigated this hypothesis by analyzing Twitter references to Hillary Clinton before, during, and after her presidential campaign. We collected a corpus of over 9 million tweets from 2014 to 2018 that referred to Hillary Clinton, and employed an interrupted time series analysis on the relative frequency of misogynistic language within the corpus. Prior to 2015, the level of misogyny associated with Clinton decreased over time, but this trend reversed when she announced her presidential campaign. During the campaign, misogyny steadily increased and only plateaued after the election, when the threat of her electoral success had subsided. These findings are consistent with the notion that online misogyny towards female political nominees is a form of backlash prompted by their ambition for power in the political arena.

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Section: Backlash Theorymentioning

confidence: 98%

Twitter misogyny associated with Hillary Clinton increased throughout the 2016 U.S. election campaign

Weaving

Alshaabi

Arnold

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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“…Unpacking the content of gender stereotypes is key to understanding their effects. Much of the research in this area is built on the idea that gender stereotype content falls into two categories: agency and communion (Bakan 1966, Broverman et al 1972). Agency, a set of attributes that is most strongly associated with men, encompasses task orientation and goal achievement.…”

Section: The Content Of Gender Stereotypesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Whether real or perceived, power-seeking intentions have been shown to negatively affect evaluations of women but not of men (Okimoto & Brescoll 2010, Toneva et al 2020. For example, in research tracking voter attitudes toward presidential candidates, women who decided to run for office were seen as less warm and likeable than their male counterparts and, as a result, were less likely to receive voters' support (Bauer et al 2022). Women also face penalties when initiating negotiations to improve their salaries.…”

Section: Dominancementioning

confidence: 99%

Women at Work: Pathways from Gender Stereotypes to Gender Bias and Discrimination

Heilman,

Caleo,

Manzi

2024

Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav.

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Despite important advances, gender-based discrimination continues to hinder women's career progress. This review examines the role that gender stereotypes play in promoting gender bias and discrimination. After reviewing what is known about the content of gender stereotypes and examining both their descriptive and prescriptive aspects, we discuss two pathways through which stereotypes result in discrepant work outcomes for women and men. First, we consider how the characterization of women as communal conflicts with the perceived demands of many male gender-typed jobs and fields, thus promoting perceptions of women's incompetence in those areas. Second, we consider how norms about how women should and should not behave cause women to incur penalties when they exhibit counter-stereotypical attributes and behaviors at work. Our review further focuses on the conditions that foster or undercut gender bias and discrimination and uses this knowledge as a foundation for proposing strategies to promote more egalitarian organizational processes. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 11 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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“…Some scholarship finds that women do not face a gendered penalty for masculine behaviors (Brooks 2011). Other research finds that any penalty women face is conditional on characteristics of voters such as relative partisanship between the voter and the candidate or ideology (Bauer, Kalmoe, and Russell 2022; Bernhard 2021; Krupnikov and Bauer 2014; Saha and Weeks 2020), the type of masculine behavior such as failing to engage in legislative compromise or bipartisanship (Bauer, Yong Harbridge, and Krupnikov 2017; Vraga 2017), or the level of exposure people have to a woman engaging in masculine activities (Bauer, Harman, and Russell 2022). A growing body of scholarship finds that women often manage a gendered backlash by adopting dual-stereotype strategies that relies on both feminine and masculine stereotypes in the content and the tone of the message (Bauer and Santia 2021; Carpinella and Bauer 2021) and such approaches can be successful for women.…”

Section: Legislator Gender Productivity and Strategic Messagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Self-promotion can be fraught for women 1 because highlighting accomplishments is a stereotypically masculine activity, meaning it goes against the feminine stereotypic expectations that women should be humble and modest (Vinkenburg et al 2011;Prentice and Carranza 2002). Women are thought to face penalties for breaking with masculine norms (Smith and Huntoon 2014;Rudman 1998) but research offers mixed evidence on this point (Brooks 2013;Bauer, Harman, and Russell 2022). A gendered self-promotion backlash means that women incumbents might not be able to effectively engage in the conventional behaviors thought to secure reelection (Fenno 1978;Mayhew 1974).…”

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confidence: 99%

Gendered Self-Promotion: Differences in How Voters Evaluate Women and Men Who Highlight Their Legislative Accomplishments

Bauer

2023

Political Research Quarterly

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Conventional wisdom suggests that women can face a punishment from voters for engaging in self-promotion. Self-promotion, highlighting your accomplishments, can be detrimental to women because such behavior violates feminine stereotypic expectations that women be modest and humble. I argue and show that voters do not punish women for engaging in self-promotion but there are different styles of self-promotion that are more beneficial to women than others. I argue that women will be most successful when they use a communal style of self-promotion that emphasizes feminine stereotypic qualities, such as compromise. Conversely, I argue that agentic forms of self-promotion, which draw on masculine qualities, will be less successful for women because agency violates feminine expectations for women. I test the effects of communal and agentic self-promotion using two experiments. The result shows two key findings. First, voters do not punish women incumbents for using agentic styles of self-promotion, but women receive more positive evaluations with communal self-promotion. Second, voters are slightly more likely to reward men for communal self-promotion relative to women legislators.

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Do voters punish ambitious women? Tracking a gendered backlash toward the 2020 democratic presidential contenders

Cited by 6 publications

References 48 publications

Twitter misogyny associated with Hillary Clinton increased throughout the 2016 U.S. election campaign

Twitter misogyny associated with Hillary Clinton increased throughout the 2016 U.S. election campaign

Women at Work: Pathways from Gender Stereotypes to Gender Bias and Discrimination

Gendered Self-Promotion: Differences in How Voters Evaluate Women and Men Who Highlight Their Legislative Accomplishments

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