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Gender as a Factor in the Attribution of Leadership Traits
Deborah Alexander and Kristi Andersen
Political Research Quarterly 1993 46: 527
DOI: 10.1177/106591299304600305
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>> Version of Record - Sep 1, 1993
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Gender as a Factor in the
Attribution of Leadership Traits
DEBORAH ALEXANDER, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
KRISTI ANDERSEN, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
The candidate evaluation literature has emphasized the contribution of
both candidate characteristics and voter characteristics (e.g., party
identification) to candidate appraisals. But the literature on attribution and
sex role stereotypes suggests that women candidates may be evaluated
differently than their male counterparts. This paper presents the results of
a survey of 98 voters in which we explored the relationships among
gender role attitudes, voters’ attribution of leadership traits, and support
for male and female candidates. The surveys were conducted in Syracuse,
New York, during the 1990 campaigns, which included three male-female
races. Our results substantiate the hypothesis that when candidate
information is sparse, gender role attitudes are consequential in the initial
evaluation of lesser known women candidates. Gender attitudes are
important factors in candidate favorability when the candidates are
women challengers. Secondly, we found that voters had a tendency to
attribute particular leadership qualities and issue skills based on sex to
hypothetical candidates, if no other information was available. In addition,
we found that the more egalitarian the voters’ gender role attitudes, the
more likely they were to evaluate favorably actual women candidates.
Finally, it was the case that all incumbents, male and female, were rated
more positively on both "masculine" and "feminine" traits than were
challengers.
Predicting election results in the United States is a hazardous job. But there is
one prediction that any election-eve analyst could offer with supreme confidence
that the newly elected official would be male. (Hershey 1980:
...
179).
during the much-touted &dquo;Year of the Woman&dquo; such a prediction would
be a fairly safe one at higher levels of government: the 1992 elections, certainly a success for women, produced a House of Representatives which is
only 11 percent female. This is despite the fact that many recent studies have
found that voters are generally indifferent to a candidate’s sex in making their
vote decision (e.g., Carroll 1985; Darcy et al. 1987).
The apparent lack of gender bias in the voting booth (at least as measured by aggregate voting statistics) should not lead us to assume that there
Even
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differences in the way voters think about and evaluate male and
female candidates and politicians. The fact that gender role stereotypes characterize and influence many decision-making domains suggests that voters
might use stereotypes to attribute different skills and capabilities to men and
women candidates. Women have not been a major focus of the extensive
literature on candidate evaluation, but some recent work has raised questions
about voters’ differential perceptions of male and female candidates. Research
designs examining voter sexual stereotyping have been both experimental
(for example, Adams 1975; Gitelson and Gitelson 1981; Hedlund et at.
1979; Huddy and Terkildsen 1991; Mend et al. 1976; Sapiro 1981) and
nonexperimental (e.g., Boles and Durio 1980, 1981; Hershey 1977); but
almost all of them have used students as subjects and fictitious candidates as
the objects of investigation.
The research described here, in contrast, examines the attribution of traditional sex-typed leadership traits to real candidates (three female-male pairs)
by a small sample of voters exposed to their campaigns. We confirm past
findings that hypothetical male and female candidates are attributed different
skills (based on sex roles and accompanying skills and traits), and use survey
data to ask several questions. First, do voters’ perceptions of male and female
candidates’ skills and issue strengths in actual campaigns vary in the expected
ways? Second, are voters’ general evaluations of male and female candidates,
and the extent to which voters use gender stereotypes related to their gender
role beliefs? And finally, does incumbency and/or voter familiarity with the
candidate seem to affect the extent to which voters stereotype candidates
are not
according to
sex?
VOTER SEXISM
OR
DIFFERENTIAL EVALUATION?
Male dominance of political leadership has been challenged by the campign
triumphs of women candidates in the last two decades. The 1990 campaign
year saw record numbers of women candidates for political office, including
85 running for statewide executive seats, 8 for the U.S. Senate, 70 U.S. House
of Representatives candidates, and 2064 women seeking state legislative offices
(Center For The American Woman And Politics 1991: 1-2). At the close of
the 1990 season, 31 women (including one non-voting delegate) had won
election to Congress. Three states had women governors and the number of
women in state legislatures is more than four times larger than it was twenty
years ago.
The numerical increase in women in public office has made possible
research which has attempted to discredit one of the major theses about
women’s underrepresentation: that such underrepresentation is due to voter
sexism. Darcy and his colleagues concluded that &dquo;in general elections the
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voter
reluctance
to
support female candidates,
as
observed in the 1950s .and
1960s, had all but disappeared by the the mid-1970s&dquo; (Darcy et al. s1987:
55). However, research also exists which supports the argument that women
and men are still perceived in stereotyped ways (Boles and Durio 1981,
1980; Broverman et al. 1972; National Women’s Political Caucus 1987) and
that
roles still must deal with stereotypical expectations
Mandel
(Diamond 1977;
1981; Deber 1982; Sapiro 1983; and Sigelman,
Sigelman, and Fowler 1987).
Can it be the case that voters stereotype female candidates but simultaneously act to produce election outcomes which do not favor male candidates ? Both claims could be true if within individuals, aspects of feminine
stereotypes which are considered positive in terms of suitability for elective
office and those which are considered negative &dquo;cancel each other out,&dquo; so to
speak, so that vote decisions are made which look as if they are sex-blind. Or
this &dquo;cancelling out&dquo; process may work across offices or structural situations,
so that women are seen as more supportable for particular offices, or so that
female incumbents are stereotyped positively as compared to female challengers, or so that the issues which characterize particular local races help
produce negative stereotypes of women candidates which in turn limit their
women
in
political
support.
sexism has been conceptualized as hostility toward
candidates
and consequent reluctance to vote for women
political
candidates. The existence of voter sexism has been measured by looking at
election outcomes, e.g. by pooling many election results, controlling for variables
such as incumbency and party, and then testing the null hypothesis that male
candidates have no advantage over female candidates. But if the possibilities
described above are to be investigated, a closer look at voters’ reactions to
female and male candidates is critical. Experimental research certainly supports the notion that voters may designate particular offices as appropriate for
women or define certain political climates as more suitable for a woman’s
particular political skills. Gender role stereotypes may no longer relegate
women to the domestic domain or block their entrance into elective office,
but may constrain public expectations about women’s areas of expertise and
appropriate level of public office. In the present research, these questions are
approached through the use of survey data collected in a particular political
context and measuring attitudes toward real candidates.
In the
past,
voter
women as
EVIDENCE FOR DIFFERENTIAL EVALUATION
years, various studies have assessed the effect of gender in evaluation and decision-making processes. These studies reveal that gender has
In
recent
been associated with differential
ratings of elected officials’ job performance
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of identical tasks at identical levels of achievement (Mend et al. 1976). Sex
role stereotypes have been shown to affect perceptions of academic competence (Fidell 1970; Simpson 1970); perceptions of emotional maturity and
social competence (Broverman et al. 1972); attribution of success (Deaux and
Emswiller 1974); ratings of artistic and authorship performance (Goldberg
1968; Pheterson et al. 1971); attribution of different issue expertise for male
and female candidates (Sapiro 1981); and finally, differential perceptions of
candidate strength and power across gender (Gitelson and Gitelson 1981).
Boles and Durio (1980, 1981), measuring perceptions about male and
female politicians, found distinct differences in gender and political labels.
Generally, the &dquo;elected woman&dquo; label was evaluated more positively than the
&dquo;elected man&dquo; on traditionally female traits and women were perceived as
equal or superior to male politicians in terms of the masculine characteristics
of efficiency, stability, and vitality (Boles and Durio 1981: 4-12). This suggests that gender stereotypes may not necessarily slow the progress of women
candidates in winning public office; nevertheless, it confirms suspicions that
women candidates have to present themsleves as both &dquo;male&dquo; and &dquo;female&dquo; to
satisfy voters’ expectations.
Evidence for differential evaluation also comes from
Polls confirm that women candidates tend to be seen as
and honest while men are
Women are also attributed
&dquo;social&dquo;
public opinion polls.
more
compassionate
be better suited emotionally for politics.
expertise in health care, education, and other
seen to
an
&dquo;domestic&dquo; issues that male candidates don’t have (Toner 1990). A
Lou Harris poll in 1972 revealed distinctly different appraisals of the abilities
of men and women in office. The public judged men better at directing the
military, managing business and labor issues, strengthening the economy,
and dealing with demonstrations and international diplomacy, while women
were thought to be better on issues about children and family, education, the
arts, health, poverty, and consumer issues (Sapiro 1983).
Fifteen years later, voters in a national survey thought that women running for office were more compassionate, more caring, more honest and
would do a better job handling social issues and holding down government
spending, while male candidates were perceived to be more effective at dealing with military and trade issues (National Women’s Political Caucus 1987).
Women political leaders, candidates, and political consultants believe that
their experiences confirm the endurance of voter stereotypes (Kirkpatrick
1974; Lake 1989; Mandel 1981).
or
VOTER ATTRIBUTION
OF
SKILLS AND TRAITS
a candidate-centered age, a good deal of attention has been paid to the
factors and processes that voters utilize in evaluating candidates. Research
In
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shows that perceived candidate qualities have become more salient to voters
than political parties (Kagay and Caldeira 1975; Miller et al. 1986); consequently political scientists have begun to assess the impact of candidate
images on electability and to pinpoint the characteristics that shape the
candidate’s image in the voter’s eye (Abelson et al. 1982). The research done
by Lodge and his associates (1989) solidly demonstrates the importance of
candidate-specific impressions as part of the candidate evaluation processes.
Perceiver characteristics such as partisanship have frequently been assumed
to be the underpinnings of candidate evaluations. Just as partisanship is an
important factor in the development of candidate images, so may one’s gender ideology have an effect on the formation of candidate images. That is, a
voter’s allegiance to &dquo;traditional&dquo; or &dquo;egalitarian&dquo; sex role norms may have an
important impact on how candidates are perceived. Although gender beliefs
probably have no impact on political contests between males, it is likely that
gender expectation and norms become salient in races between males and
females. Hershey uncovered significant sex differences in college students’
willingness to support female political candidates. Young men, particularly
those with masculine (as opposed to flexible or feminine) sex role orientations held more negative views of female candidates. Pursuing the relationship between gender role attitudes and attitudes toward women in politics,
Hershey (1977, 1980) confirmed that supporters of women candidates are
most likely to have egalitarian sex-role attitudes.
CAMPAIGN 1990: SYRACUSE, NEW YORK
Onondaga County, in Central New York, three races in the fall of 1990
matched male and female candidates: New York State Comptroller (Ned
Regan, Republican incumbent vs. Carol Bellamy, Democratic challenger); the
48th State Senate District (Nancy Larraine Hoffmann, Democratic incumbent
vs. Jack Luchsinger, Republican challenger); and the 27th Congressional District (James Walsh, Republican incumbent vs. Peggy Murray, Democratic
challenger). These races provided us with an interesting variety of incumbent
men and women, well-known and unknown names and different levels and
types of elective office.
In the congressional race, Republican James Walsh (son of a former congressman and mayor of Syracuse, and himself a past city district councilor
and president of the city council) was running for re-election to his second
term as congressional representative from the 27th District, after an impressive victory in 1988. His Democratic competitor, Peggy Murray, was a firsttime candidate for public office and former president of the Central New York
chapter of the National Organization for Women. Local Democrats had invested
heavily in the 1986 and 1988 congressional races. By the 1990 campaign, the
In
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depleted of energy and resources. Murray was
unable to rally enthusiasm for her candidacy, and Walsh easily won a second
term by a margin of 63 percent to 35 percent.
party and its workers
were
Nancy Larraine Hoffmann, three-time winner in
and
rural State Senate district, had enjoyed larger
predominantly Republican
A minority member of the New York State
of
with
each
race.
margins victory
for
Hoffmann
was
Senate,
targeted defeat by the State Senate Republican leadand
her
ers,
opponent, Jack Luchsinger, attorney and first-time candidate,
was heavily financed by state Republicans. With combined expenditures of
nearly $600,000 this race turned out to be the most expensive State Senate
race ever in Central New York. In the end, Hoffmann survived Luchsinger’s
challenge, defeating him with 56 percent of the vote in the Onondaga County
portion of the State Senate District.
In the New York State Comptroller’s race, Democrat Carol Bellamy, former
New York City Council president and unsuccessful mayoral candidate, took
on a two-term Republican incumbent, Ned Regan, in a race for an office that
few voters knew or cared about. Although overshadowed by more locally
based elective offices and more familiar faces, this race was a critical step for
women interested in diminishing barriers to executive office. A record low
turnout in Bellamy’s voter base of New York City resulted in the closest statewide race of 1990. But Bellamy was unsuccessful, receiving 47 percent of the
vote statewide and only 40 percent in Onondaga County.
Democratic State Senator
a
DATA AND METHODS
Sample
The research reported here is part of a larger project which monitored voters’
responses to campaign information and examined the ways in which gender
stereotypes were affected by such information. The research reported here is
based on survey data from 98 respondents. The sample was randomly
selected from 1990 voter files purchased from the Onondaga County Board of
Elections. We sampled voters who lived in areas of the county where the
48th Senate District overlapped with the 27th Congressional District, and
who had voted at least once in the past four years. The overlap area included
half of the City of Syracuse, and the northern, eastern, and southern suburbs
of Onondaga County. Three hundred names were used to reach 98 respondents. The sampling error is approximately ±.08. The refusal rate was 23
1
The larger project involved less structured, more intensive interviews with a subsample
of respondents and candidates’ staff members and content analysis of newspaper coverage of the campaigns. Analysis of these data is not reported here.
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percent; 12 percent of the phone numbers were disconnected; and 32 percent of the 300 were unreachable after five callbacks. Interviewers were
trained undergraduates. Respondents were told that we were conducting a
study about local political candidates and that the survey was not associated
with any of the candidates or parties. The relatively small size of the sample
makes it imperative to assess its representativeness. Comparing sample respondents with the voting population, the respondent sample contains a somewhat lower proportion of Republicans (33 percent) than does the Onondaga
County portion of the 48th Senate District (41 percent), and a slightly higher
proportion of Nonenrolled (29 percent) and Democrats (37 percent) than the
population (23 percent and 34 percent). The sample did not vary significantly from the population in terms of sex.
We conducted two separate surveys to avoid the possible problems involved
in including questions about specific male and female candidates and about
gender issues on the same instrument. Conducted August 6-9, the initial survey probed media use, candiate familiarity, gender role beliefs, gender-typed
capabilities and issues, and level of office associated with male and female
candidates and officeholders, in addition to questions of political ideology,
race, income, and education. Party enrollment, age, and sex were provided by
the voter rolls. The second survey, conducted September 4-6, asked respondents to rate all candidates on favorability and on seven traits, pre-tested to
demonstrate
sex-typed
attributions.
KEY VARIABLES
Gender Role Ideology scale from six Likert-type attitude
statements about gender role attitudes. These variables are proxies for the
assumed underlying theoretical construct of gender role traditionalism. Four
of the items were adapted from the 1988 NORC General Social Survey and
two items were adapted from Brogan and Kutner’s ( 1976) work on the construction of a normative gender role scale. Examples of items are: &dquo;It is more important for a wife to help her husband’s career than to have a career herself&dquo;;
and &dquo;Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.&dquo;
The reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) for the scale was 0.79.2 For
some of the analyses, respondents were classified into three &dquo;gender belief’
groups: Traditionals (n=20), Moderates (n=63), and Egalitarians (n=14).
We constructed
2
a
principal component factor analysis of the sex role variables extracted only one facsupporting the unidimensionality of the scale. Our sample’s responses to the items
were fairly similar to those of the NORC sample: for example, when presented the
statement "A preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works," 54 percent
of our sample and 51 percent of the NORC sample disagreed.
A
tor,
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Six candidates were rated on seven traits: honesty, ability to handle a
crisis, emotional stability, compassion, decisiveness, ability to compromise,
and competence.3 Three of the traits-honesty, compassion, and ability to
compromise-measured traditionally &dquo;feminine&dquo; capabilities. Three other traitsthe ability to handle a crisis, decisiveness, and emotional stability-are traditionally associated with men and leadership. The last trait-competence-was
assumed for this research to be gender neutral. Feminine and masculine
indices were constructed for each candidate by summing, respectively, their
masculine trait scores or feminine trait scores. Furthermore, additive feminine
and masculine indices were developed for each sex group of candidates (see
Appendix for scale and alpha coefficients).4
ANALYSIS
The analyses
we performed on the data were designed to examine respondents’
of
perceptions male and female candidates in the abstract; to see how well
known and favorably regarded the actual male and female candidates were;
to see whether respondents’ gender ideologies affected candidate favorability;
and to see whether gender ideology seemed to produce candidate stereo-
typing.
Gender-Associated Issues and Traits
interested in seeing whether the Syracuse sample, like the experimental subjects and survey respondents in the research discussed above,
associated particular traits, capabilities and issue with female candidates or
officeholders. Table 1 presents a listing of issues and the percentages of
respondents who indicated that either a woman or man candidate would do
a better job dealing with the issue when in office. Although a
majority replied
that there were no differences between the sexes’ ability to deal with several
issues, the net difference between males and females on most of the issues
We
3
were
are grateful to Marie Morse, Research Director at the National Women’s Political
Caucus (NWPC) and Harrison Hickman of the Hickman-Brown Public Opinion Research
firm (both of Washington, DC) for allowing us to borrow and paraphrase some of these
questions from a model questionnaire prepared for NWPC’s nationwide survey, "The
New Political Woman," released in 1987.
4
Most of the research about women candidates and public perception of leadership
traits has been commissioned by the National Women’s Political Caucus (1984a, 1984b,
1987, 1989; and Williams 1987); see also Boles and Durio (1980, 1981). The research
reports that women candidates are more likely to have an advantage on the traits of
honesty and compassion, and males are likely to have an advantage on the attributes of
handling a crisis and emotional stability. "Working out compromises" and decisiveness
produce contradictory or unclear findings.
We
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the continued stereotyping of men and women, e.g., the female candidate would do a better job with day care, education, helping the poor and
needy, AIDS, health care, environment and civil rights; the male candidate
would do a better job with military spending, foreign trade, agriculture, and
taxes. There were, however, some surprises and indications of change in
expected patterns. Voters also indicated that they thought women would do a
better job with government spending and the federal deficit; and the malefemale advantage on arms control was only about 10 percent. At least in the
abstract, women have a comparable &dquo;playing field&dquo; for most domestic issues
and, in fact, appear to have a broader and more diverse issue repertoire than
their male counterparts.
testify to
# Table 1
ISSUES ASSOCIATED
&dquo; ... tell
better
me
WITH
FEMALE
AND
MALE CANDIDATES
whether you think the man or the woman [candidate] would, most of the time, do a
the issue when in office.&dquo; Figures are percent of respondents saying &dquo;man,&dquo;
job dealing with
&dquo;woman,&dquo;
or
&dquo;no difference.&dquo;
N-98
Table 2 is a similar presentation of candidate traits or capabilities. Again,
respondents were asked if they associated the word or phrase more with a
hypothetical male or female candidate. Even at a cursory glance, it is apparent
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= Table 2
CAPABILITIES ASSOCIATED
WITH
MALE
AND
FEMALE CANDIDATES
me whether you would, most of the time, associate it [words and phrases] more with the
candidate or woman candidate.&dquo; Figures are percent of respondents saying &dquo;man,&dquo; &dquo;woman,&dquo; or
&dquo;no difference.&dquo;
... tell
man
N-98
that voters still believe that male and female candidates possess distinct skills
and capabilities. By large margins, women are believed to be more compassionate, moral, hardworking, and liberal. Women, more so than their male
counterparts, are also thought to have stuggled to get ahead, be able to handle
family responsibilities while serving in offices, speak out honestly, and stand
up for what they believe. Men, on the other hand, are believed to be tougher,
more able to handle a crisis, more emotionally stable, more decisive, and
more conservative, although the percentage margins are narrower for the
&dquo;male advantaged&dquo; capabilities than the margins for &dquo;female advantaged&dquo; traits.
Candidate
To
begin
Favorability
our assessment
beliefs affected voters’
of the
which stereotypes and gender role
of these six candidates, we asked how
extent to
perceptions
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favorably respondents viewed each of the candidates; Table 3 shows these
&dquo;favorability&dquo; responses. In September, Congressman James Walsh and State
Senator Nancy Larraine Hoffmann were well known to our sample. In fact,
both incumbents were known by all voters in this sample; in contrast, their
opponents, Peggy Murray and Jack Luchsinger, were unknown to roughly
one-half to one-third of the voters in September. Although the New York State
Comptroller, Ned Regan, was a longtime incumbent, his name was not as
familiar to the voters as the two other incumbents. The comptroller’s challenger, Carol Bellamy, was unknown to almost half (46 percent) of the sample
voters. Luchsinger, who began an agressive television ad campaign in early
summer, was given the highest favorable and unfavorable ratings of the challengers, most likely reflective of the very negative tone of his advertising campaign. On the other hand, his opponent, State Senator Hoffmann, enjoyed the
highest favorable and the lowest neutral or unfavorable percentages of all six
candidates. We expected that high neutral and/or unknown scores would
indicate a greater use of stereotypes to make judgments about less wellknown candidates.
# Table 3
CANDIDATE FAVORABILITY PERCENTAGES
&dquo; ... could you tell
me on a
scale of one
to
five how favorable
an
impression you have of this person?&dquo;
N-98
D-Democrat
M-Male F-Female
I-Incumbent C-Challenger
Key: R-Republican
*Combines &dquo;very favorable&dquo; and &dquo;favorable&dquo; responses
*
*Combines &dquo;very unfavorable&dquo; and &dquo;unfavorable&dquo; responses
Candidate
Favorability and Gender Ideology
Is favorability associated with gender beliefs? We posed this question by
looking at the association between gender role beliefs and candidate favorability.
Table 4 shows the correlation coefficients for gender role beliefs and each
candidate’s favorability scores. Only in the instances of the two women chal537
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lengers (Peggy Murray and Carol Bellamy) are gender beliefs significantly
related to candidate favorability. In other words, the more egalitarian the
voters’ gender beliefs, the more likely they were to rate these two women
positively as the campaign began. When we looked at the ratings themselves
(rather than the correlations), for example, Peggy Murray’s mean favorability
rating among Traditionals in September was .74; among Moderates 1.26; and
among Egalitarians 2.57 (all between-group differences significant at p < .05).
Gender role beliefs were not significantly associated with evaluation of the
male challenger. This finding suggests that when other candidate information
is sparse, gender role beliefs may be consequential in the initial evaluation of
less-known
women
candidates.
# Table 4
CORRELATION
OF
GENDER ROLE BELIEFS
GENDER STEREOTYPING
OF
WITH
CANDIDATE FAVORABILITY RATINGS
CANDIDATES
Our reading of the literature on gender stereotyping led us to expect that the
less well-known candidates (challengers in the State Senate and congressional
race and both the comptroller candidates) would be perceived more
stereotypically, but this expectation was not clearly borne out (see Table 5).
The two female challengers were not seen as &dquo;more feminine&dquo; than the female
incumbent (the opposite is true); in fact, Peggy Murray, the least-known candidate in September, has the lowest score of any candidate on the feminine
trait index while State Senator Nancy Larraine Hoffmann has the highest (the
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difference between Hoffman’s feminine score and those of Murray and
is
Bellamy
significant at p < .10).
Neither are the female challengers perceived as more feminine than masculine. It is possible to argue that Jack Luchsinger and Ned Regan, less familiar than Walsh, are perceived in stereotypical terms: their masculine index
scores are significantly (p < .05)
higher than their feminine index scores. But
the most interesting pattern to emerge here is that all incumbents, both male
and female, are rated more positively on both masculine and feminine scales
than are their challengers (incumbent-challenger differences are significant
[p < .05] in all cases except the difference between Regan and Bellamy on the
feminine traits index).
# Table 5
CANDIDATE MEANS ON FEMININE
Key:
AND
MASCULINE INDICES
Feminine Traits Index - Summated index of COMPASSIONATE, HONEST, and
COMPROMISE
Masculine Traits Index = Summated index of DECISIVE, CRISIS, and EMOTIONAL
STABILITY
R=Republican F=Female
D-Democrat I=Incumbent
M=Male C-Challenger
Candidate Trait
Ratings
and Gender
Ideology
We wanted
to see if (as we expected) gender beliefs were related to sex stereowhether
for example, those who endorsed more traditional sex roles
typing :
the
(i.e.,
Traditionals, on our scale), would perceive female candidates in
stereotypically &dquo;feminine&dquo; ways. Voters think about candidates not as isolated
individuals but in the context of a particular electoral campaign. Thus it
makes sense to see whether, in a male-female race, &dquo;traditional,&dquo; &dquo;moderate,&dquo;
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&dquo;egalitarian&dquo; voters attribute traditionally &dquo;male&dquo; characteristics to the male
candidate while seeing the female candidate as, for example, more compassionate, and honest. Each group’s mean rating of a candidate on the &dquo;masculine&dquo;
scale was subtracted from its mean rating of that candidate on the &dquo;feminine&dquo;
scale. In Figure 1 these differences are presented so that if a candidate is
rated more highly on the masculine attributes than on the feminine attributes,
that candidate’s bar appears to the left of the zero point.
Looking at these data across the races at the same time we compare
gender groups, several conclusions can be drawn. First, in the comptroller
race, where the candidates were relatively unfamiliar to Central New Yorkers,
the candidates were perceived as having distinct gender-specific attributes.
Second, the Moderates, who represent the bulk of our sample, tended to stereotype male candidates but not female candidates. Third, the Egalitarians saw
the State Senate race in stereotypical terms: a traditionally &dquo;male&dquo; candidate
running against a female candidate with traditional feminine attributes (we
have no explanation for the fact that the congressional challenger, Peggy
Murray, was given such high masculine ratings by the Egalitarians, except to
suggest that an unknown woman venturing into the male domain of congressional politics might be assumed to possess &dquo;masculine&dquo; traits).
The final conclusion, evident when we examined the mean scores rather
than the differences presented in Figure 1, is that in the context of a real-life
campaign, the candidate may well matter more than one’s gender role beliefs.
or
Nancy Larraine Hoffmann, the familiar State Senator, was ranked high on
both masculine and feminine traits by all three groups; the less well-known
candidates received lower scores from all groups on both sets of traits.
Another way to analyze the relationship between gender role beliefs and
candidate evaluation is to aggregate the data for male and female candidates,
disregarding incumbency status. The overall lowest ratings are given to women
candidates, on both masculine and feminine traits, by Traditionalists. Conversely, the highest ratings on both scales are given to women by the Egalitarians. Moderates are the only group which &dquo;stereotype&dquo; male candidates (that
is, give males in the aggregate a higher masculine than feminine score).
Looked at in this way, the Egalitarians are perceiving the women candidates
in a more &dquo;stereotypical&dquo; manner than the other two groups-but it may well
be that here we are tapping into a kind of &dquo;female boosterism&dquo; where those
who espouse egalitarian sex roles at the same time view the skills and traits
of women candidates as both &dquo;different&dquo; and &dquo;better.&dquo;5
5
We
are
Political
indebted for this
suggestion
to one
of the anonymous reviewers for Western
Quarterly.
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~ Figure
1
GENDER ROLE BELIEFS
AND
CANDIDATE STEREOTYPING
Bars represent the difference between
a candidate’s mean score on the feminine index and
the masculine index. Thus a high positive value would indicate that a
group viewed a candidate as having predominantely traditional feminine attributes; a negative
value that the candidate was seen as having traditional male attributes.
*Difference between Walsh’s scores on feminine and masculine indices was zero for Egalitarian.
their
mean score on
suggest that gender role beliefs may predispose people to
less favorable view of women politicians, and in particular that
those who profess an egaliatarian ideology see female candidates in a positive
light both in traditional &dquo;feminine&dquo; terms and in their possession of more
&dquo;masculine&dquo; attributes. On the other hand, those who are traditional in their
sex role beliefs simply have a less positive view of women candidates’ attributes
and may enter a campaign season less favorably inclined toward women
candidates.
These
findings
a more or
Women
as
Leaders:
Equal
but
Different?
Experimental researchers have the clear advantage of being able to control
their independent variables; our research is, conversely, disadvantaged by the
541
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.,
fact that incumbency, sex, party and other characteristics inhere in the particular candidates we studied and cannot be systematically varied. Thus we
must be cautious in drawing conclusions about the causal importance of
sex-or incumbency or other variables for that matter. It is the case, however,
that our conclusions are generally consistent with recent experimental research
on gender stereotyping of candidates (e.g., Huddy and Terkildsen 1991) as
well as with research on candidate evaluation.
Our small sample of voters, like the subjects studied by other researchers, attribute somewhat different skills, traits, and issue competencies to
hypothetical male and female candidates; these distinctions, in fact, tend to
advantage female candidates. We also found that all the incumbents were
both better known (not surprisingly) and viewed more favorably than the
challengers, regardless of sex or party. Neither the women nor the men in
these races appear to be strongly stereotyped. Gender beliefs are associated
with candidate favorablility only for the least familiar candidates, and traditionalism is not associated with a tendency to stereotype candidates. Egalitarians, however, do tend to show a general tendency to rate female candidates
positively, while Traditionalists give women less positive ratings. In all the
races, the incumbents are given more positive ratings than challengers on
both masculine and feminine traits. And incumbents who are well known to
the voters-in this case Congressman Walsh and State Senator Hoffmannactually contradict gender stereotypes by what could be called their
&dquo;androgynous&dquo; evaluations: high scores on both kinds of traits.
Incumbency clearly matters most, but in these contests candidates’ sexif the candidates were unfamiliar-did seem to play a role in shaping voter
perceptions. To the extent that popular perception of women leaders still partakes of traditional stereotypes, the growing numbers of women candidates
and elected officials may indicate the electorate’s endorsement of the skills
and capabilities unique to their experiences as women. We are now witness
to a reconstruction of leadership images which allows the entrance of women
into the political arena but still maintains a differentiation based on sex. Successful women candidates feel the double bind of having to be both feminine
and masculine. They are welcomed into the political fray, as long as they
bring with them their traditional skills, capabilities, and vestiges of their roles
as mother and spouses. At the same time they have to demonstrate their
power, toughness, and capacity to win, traits assumed by most voters to be
inherent in most male candidates.
The media contribute to this contingent welcome by describing women’s
campaigns as a &dquo;needed voice in government because of their insights on
issues as education, the environment, child care and health care.&dquo; Consultants
and candidates, in creating an acceptable campaign image for women candi542
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dates, capitalize on the public’s stereotypical expectations in developing images
that are consistent with those beliefs. Mervin Field, of the California Poll, in
the political context of California’s gubernatorial race, called this
need for women’s insights as &dquo;the woman thing.&dquo; Or as former San Fancisco
mayor and past gubernatorial candidate Diane Feinstein would tell her campaign
audiences, &dquo;This state could use a little mothering.&dquo;
What are the implications for the conceptualization of women as candidates ? How do we successfully run women for office without &dquo;essentializing
gender&dquo; in the process? There is no easy answer. Our analysis of candidate
image suggests the constructed character of the woman candidate while also
offering hope that in the process of running for-and winning-public office,
leadership is being redefined to include the best of men and women’s
discussing
capabilities.
APPENDIX
The summated scales and their reliabilities (Cronbach’s alpha) are:
( 1 ) FEMDEXW: Three women’s candidates’ scores on HONESTY, COMPASSION and COMPROMISE (alpha
0.88).
(2) MASDEXW: Three women candidates’ scores on DECISIVENESS,
EMOTIONAL STABILITY and CRISIS (alpha
0.88).
(3) FEMDEXM: Three men candidates’ scores on HONESTY, COMPASSION and COMPROMISE (alpha
0.90).
(4) MASDEXM1: Three men candidates’ scores on DECISIVENESS,
EMOTIONAL STABILITY and COMPROMISE (alpha
0.89).
=
=
=
=
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