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Are feminine traits a liability in elections?

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“It is not easy to be a woman in politics … it can be excruciating, humiliating. The moment a woman steps forward and says ‘I’m running for office,’ it begins: the analysis of her face, her body, her voice, her demeanor; the diminishment of her stature, her ideas, her accomplishments, her integrity. It can be unbelievably cruel.”

Hilary Clinton 2017: 116.

Abstract

A possible reason for the lack of women in elected positions is that voters prefer candidates with masculine qualities. Studies have found that women and men politicians tend to emphasize different candidate traits during an election campaign. In the present study, we designed an online experiment in which candidates were asked to tell voters their best personal quality. We investigate whether candidates choose a feminine or a masculine trait and whether those who choose a feminine trait had more (fewer) votes. We find that candidates are slightly more prone to select feminine traits over masculine traits (though the difference is not statistically significant) and that candidates who choose feminine traits receive slightly more votes.

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Notes

  1. https://data.ipu.org/women-averages?month=7&year=2023

  2. https://data.ipu.org/women-ranking?month=7&year=2023

  3. See: https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/levels-office/congress/women-us-congress-2022

  4. https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/646103864454713344?s=20

  5. https://time.com/4369002/barack-obama-united-state-of-women-summit/

  6. https://en-marche.fr/articles/discours/emmanuel-macron-women-forum-for-the-economy-and-society-discours

  7. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/03/24/remarks-by-president-biden-in-address-to-the-canadian-parliament/

  8. The authors call this a ‘truthful campaign’; we believe it is more appropriate to label this ‘no campaign’ as the candidates had nothing to do; their score on a previous task was automatically revealed to the group.

  9. See A2 for the exact wording of the questions.

  10. See A2 for the exact wording of the experimental design.

  11. 76% and 56% were candidates in the first and second elections.

  12. Readers will observe that the list contains more feminine than masculine traits. We recognize that it would have been preferable to have a more balanced list. One concern is that, as a consequence, feminine traits may have been perceived to be less informative. It is impossible to tell whether this affected the results. We note, however, that feminine traits were in fact more often selected than masculine traits (see Tables 1 and 2).

  13. We have performed additional analyses in which we control for whether the candidate had won the previous (second) election, and the results are very similar. See Table 3 in the A3. We have also performed analyses focusing only on those who were candidates in both elections 2 and 3 and in which we control for the number of votes in the second election, thus allowing us to compare electoral performance in election 3 relative to that in election 2. The results, which are similar, are presented in Table 4 in the A3.

  14. All in all, 58% of men voters and 51% of women voters voted for a woman candidate. The difference is not statistically significant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science at L’Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    André Blais

  2. Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Semra Sevi

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  1. André Blais
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Blais, A., Sevi, S. Are feminine traits a liability in elections?. Acta Polit (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-024-00338-6

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