by Jillian Hewitt
Before I start, I’m just going to come out and say it: this piece is not written to be particularly entertaining. It’s about my junior paper (JP) and therefore is academic in nature, and it isn’t witty. But!—it’s about an extremely relevant and interesting topic so I hope you’ll keep reading.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for my JP this fall. I’m a Politics major and I had to write about something to do with politics & the mass media—a very, very broad topic. One of the articles we read for our seminar intrigued me though; it was about how the media portrays female candidates differently than male ones. Kind of obvious. Basically, there’s a lot of research that proves that women are more likely to be portrayed in terms of their gender, more likely to have their appearance and family mentioned, and less likely to have their accomplishments mentioned. There’s also research to suggest that these differences are not necessarily a bad thing; that female candidates are therefore perceived as more honest, more compassionate, etc. Basically, if the differences in the media’s portrayals of female candidates don’t actually hurt them, then we shouldn’t worry about it.
For my JP, then, I designed an experiment to test the effects of this “gendered” style of portraying women. I wrote up three statements about a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives; one was about a man and briefly described his educational background, his past political experience, and mentioned a few of his policy platforms. A second description was exactly the same, but described a woman instead of a man. This was meant to represent the way that female candidates would be described if the media portrayed them the same way that they portray men. A final statement was identical to the second one, except for the fact that the candidate’s gender was mentioned in various ways throughout the paragraph. I avoided adding substantive comments like “she has been criticized as being unqualified,” which would obviously affect respondents’ perceptions of her. Instead I simply referred in some way to her gender (i.e. “as a mother,”) three times throughout the paragraph.
Respondents read one of the three versions and then answered questions about their perceptions of the candidate: how strong they believed the candidates were in certain policy areas, whether they were likely to vote for the candidate, whether they thought the candidate would get elected, etc. I found, happily, that respondents were equally likely to say that they would vote for the male candidate as they were to say they would vote for the female candidate who was portrayed in the exact same way. In fact, slightly more people said they would vote for the woman. That is, we have reason to believe that (at least at Princeton), people are receptive to the idea of voting for a qualified, strong female candidate.
However, people were significantly less likely to say that they would vote for the female candidate whose gender was mentioned three times throughout the statement. The media’s use of “gendered” portrayals of female candidates thus cannot be seen as an advantage of any kind, but rather as an obstacle that the candidate is forced to overcome. Finally, and significantly, respondents were less likely to say that both of the female candidates would win the election than they were to say the male candidate would win. So even though people said they were equally likely to vote for the male as the identically-portrayed female, they were less likely to believe she’d actually win. It seems that, despite our personal feelings towards female candidates, there is still a pervasive cloud of doubt cast over their viability.
I read a NY Times article today about the Massachusetts Senate race that discussed the presence of a glass ceiling for women in politics in that state. The article was thought-provoking and I encourage everyone to read it, but really, what might help women in politics more than writing about the glass ceiling all the time is just presenting female candidates the same way that they present male ones.
