Here & Now

Was it Just Hillary? Gender Bias in Politics

Frederica Freyberg:

Was it just Hillary or are voters actually biased against female presidential candidates? What about bias against women running for lower office like say governor? The Elections Research Center at UW-Madison has some answers after conducting surveys to find out. Political Science Professor and Director of the Center Barry Burden is here. Thanks very much for being here.

Barry Burden:

Glad to be here.

Frederica Freyberg:

So as to that question, was it just Hillary or what did your research show about women running for president?

Barry Burden:

It was not just Hillary. She had some particular attributes that may have helped or hurt her. But we found in a national experiment that we did in a national survey that female presidential candidates suffer a bias of about two percentage points. They’re likely to get that much less of the vote than men who are equally qualified.

Frederica Freyberg:

And why?

Barry Burden:

That we’re not quite sure about. We have some clues by comparing the presidential race to other offices. We’ve done the same experiment for men and women running for Congress, running for governor, running for state legislature. We find the bias against women only in the presidential race. It might be that there are some unique things about the presidency that make it different. It’s after all is the national office. It’s the commander-in-chief. It’s a role that has a unique place in national security and foreign policy. But in our experiments we actually show voters hypothetical female candidates who are strong in national security or have hawkish positions on defense and they are also biased against. So we think the likely story has more to do with the experience that people have with women actually in office in Congress, governorships and state legislature compared to the presidency, where a voter really has to imagine what would it be like to have a woman president. Hasn’t happened. So that causes some uncertainty at least for some voters and causes them to shy away.

Frederica Freyberg:

This is being described as the year of the woman, right, in congressional races. Again, as you’re saying there’s familiarity among voters with women running for that office.

Barry Burden:

Thats right. When we presented voters in our surveys with two congressional candidates, there was no bias for or against a female candidate relative to a male. Actually in state races, in governors races, in state legislative races, we found that there was a bias in favor of the female candidate. So depending on the level of government you’re talking about, how men and women fare differs.

Frederica Freyberg:

What is that about, the bias in favor of female candidates at the state legislative or gubernatorial level?

Barry Burden:

Well, theres one group in particular that moves around in our surveys depending on the office and that’s independents. In presidential elections, it’s actually independents who show the biggest bias against female candidates. And we reason it’s because they don’t have partisanship as a crutch or cue that they can use that would guarantee them what the person in office would do.

Frederica Freyberg:

Describe that a little bit more. How does the party affiliation offer what you call insurance?

Barry Burden:

Well, party affiliation is the best guide to what a candidate would do in office. It’s one thing that’s actually provided on the ballot in most cases. You know whether the person is a D or a R. Many voters have a sense of being democrats or republicans. If you’re a republican and there’s a republican candidate on the ballet, that’s the easiest choice to make. It’s a pretty good guide to the hope that candidate will fulfill the things you’d like them to do. But for independent voters, they don’t have that kind of insurance as to what a person would do in office and so they have to rely on other kinds of shortcuts or what we call heuristics and the sex or race of the candidate would be one of those. So it’s actually independents who respond most to a female candidate in a negative way in presidential races, but actually swing and have the biggest positive response in gubernatorial and state legislative races.

Frederica Freyberg:

What kind of reaction are you getting to this research?

Barry Burden:

I think a lot of people are interested in the Hillary Clinton aspect of it. She lost the presidential race by–well she actually won the popular vote but lost in a few key states by small amounts. Our research suggests there’s enough bias present in the electorate that it could have flipped that election. That said, we do try to control in our study for attitudes toward Hillary specifically. And even accounting for that there’s still a bias against a female candidate running for president.

Frederica Freyberg:

You talk about these controls you built into your research. How different were the methods that you used in these surveys compared to how people have done it previously?

Barry Burden:

A lot of previous studies, quite naturally, looked at real elections. They’d find contests where a man and a woman had run against one another and see how they fared over a bunch of races. But it turns out that’s not the right way to do it because the women who end up running for office are just different from the men who do and from the women who don’t. Women self-select themselves out of running for office more than men do. So the women who show up are often more qualified than the men they face. So if we found, for example, in real elections that men and women fared equally, it might be that the women are actually better candidates, more qualified, have more experience but there’s a slight bias against them and those things offset. So we felt as though we needed to do an experiment where we presented voters with hypothetical candidates. We varied their attributes, their age, their background, their experience and so on, to see the pure effect of the gender of the candidate.

Frederica Freyberg:

Barry Burden, thanks very much.

Barry Burden:

Thanks.