Can I ask you a personal question?

🇺🇸 The state of the union

In about three months, US voters will head back to the polls. For just the second time in history, they’ll see a woman’s name on the ballot as the presidential candidate for one of the country’s two major political parties. The I’m with her campaign may not have carried Clinton to the White House in 2016, but now it’s brat summer and Harris is hoping 2024 is different. So we’ve been wondering…is it? The US hasn’t put a woman at the head of the Oval Office yet in its 248 year history. Though several other western nations have notably had a woman at the helm – think Margaret Thatcher of the UK, Angela Merkel of Germany, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand – the US’ lack of executive female leadership doesn’t make it that unique across the globe. As of 2023, only 59 of the 193 UN member nations had ever been run by a female leader, with only 13 women actively serving in the role at the time and only 14 nations touting more than one current or past female leader.

The US has, of course, seen a female vice president (Harris), and 12 of the 50 states’ sitting governors are women. Since the 1970s, women’s share of congressional seats has steadily been on the rise. Women now account for 25% of US senators (up from literally 0% 50 years ago), 28.5% of US representatives, 32.7% of state legislators, and, though it fluctuates more dramatically, anywhere between 25% and 50% of cabinet members. (For comparison, only 10.3% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies in 2023 were women.) The 118th US Congress, which convened early last year after the 2022 midterm elections, has more female members – 153 between the House and Senate – than ever before. To give you a sense of just how much progress that is, between 1916 and 1980, there were only 90 women who served in the House over that entire time period combined. Even more startling, over a third of those women (31) entered Congress through a practice called “widow’s succession,” meaning they were only elected to late husbands’ seats after their deaths, a fun (unfun?) fact I was not previously aware of but will undoubtedly find future occasions to bring up.

Today, female representation in Congress still falls short of women’s share of the population, particularly in the Republican party (at 15% vs. the Democrats’ 41%), but generally, these trends climb up and to the right. Perhaps even more promising, a 2019 Gallup poll found that as many as 94% of Americans said that, should their party nominate a well-qualified person for president that was also a woman, they would vote for that person. In the 1980s, similar polls were as low as 75%; in the 1950s, 52%. And yet, the unicorn that is the female president continues to elude us, at the very least until November of this year. Why? Well, we have some ideas, and this seemed like as good a time as ever to try to find out.

(Before we dive in, we should say that we have no business or interest in telling you who to vote for. You’re a smart, informed, independent person who will make that decision for yourself. Instead, we simply hope to unpack the many complex, convoluted, contradictory, emotional, psychological, and political forces at play in the collective American mind that have contributed to the lack of a female US president to date. Like we said, simple. :))

Is she giving presidential?

As we saw above, only 6% of Americans self-report that they would not vote for a female presidential candidate of their own party. Of course, there may be a difference between those who are willing to admit this (bold, I guess) and those who harbor similar sentiments they’d rather keep to themselves (sigh). Still, even if we assume a modest percentage of those misrepresenting their true feelings, the gap between what Americans say they would do at the ballot and what Americans think other Americans would do at the ballot is striking. A 2020 poll conducted by Morning Consult found that over a third (42% of women and 35% of men) thought that gender would be a major barrier for female presidential candidates, roughly another third said it would be a minor barrier (27% and 29%, respectively), and the final third felt it would be no barrier (31% and 36%). So clearly, not everyone is so confident in what their neighbors would actually do in practice despite what they’ve said they’d do in theory.

Although women tend to win their political races at the same rate as men, many contend – and some studies show – that women must be more qualified than their male counterparts in order to be seen as equally viable candidates. When it comes to the media, “women politicians receive more attention to their appearance and personal life [as well as] more negative viability coverage.” Expectations are also more complicated when it comes to the traits they must possess in order to be seen as presidential. On one hand, a significant portion of Americans surveyed in 2023 by the Pew Research Center said that a female president would actually be better than a man at working out compromises (39%), maintaining a respectful tone in politics (37%) and being honest and ethical (34%). This is consistent with the traits that people report thinking society values most in women in general, which ranks empathy second to just physical attractiveness. For men, traits like leadership and toughness prove more valuable.

It is these more “masculine” traits, however, that research shows citizens often want from their political leaders, particularly in times of war or crisis. So when running for office, women must not only meet society’s already higher bar of likability as it relates to empathy and agreeableness (...and appearance), but they must also work to prove that they, too, can exhibit stereotypically masculine traits like assertiveness and decisiveness that the public wants to see in their president. These perceived differences in natural strengths are also evident when voters are polled on the issues: while they’re much more likely to say a woman would better handle policy around healthcare, education, and women’s issues, they’re similarly more likely to say that men would be stronger when it comes to national security and foreign policy. Republican women, in particular, may also struggle with being perceived as more liberal simply because of their gender.

Is there such a thing as too pragmatic?

Despite the complexity of all of these nuanced factors which we’re just scratching the surface of, a majority of Americans (53%) believe that there are currently too few women in high political offices. So not only is a dramatic portion of the country open to voting for a female president, but a majority thinks we should be doing more to elect women to the highest ranks of government. It seems like there’s a lot of good intention out there, and yet women are still falling short in the highest profile political races. One key reason, researchers suggest, is not personal bias against female candidates, but (chillingly) what they call pragmatic bias: “a tendency to withhold support for members of groups for whom success is perceived to be difficult or impossible to achieve.“ In a series of studies, they found that voters “withhold support for women candidates because they perceive practical barriers to women successfully attaining political leadership positions,” namely “others’ unwillingness to vote for women, biased media coverage, and higher requirements to prove themselves.” As such, they were more likely to shift their votes to a candidate of the opposite gender than their preferred choice. (brb sobbing.)

It’s not hard to see how this type of bias could encumber women at every step of their political journey. It may dissuade them from entering into politics in the first place. It may make their party, incentivized to win at most costs, less likely to look to them when opportunities present themselves. It may discourage potential donors from contributing to campaign funds. And worst of all, it may shift voters’ choices away from their true preferences, especially in primary elections. It’s also not hard to see how this bias could naturally emerge without any ill intent. As we saw above, the fears of those who exhibit pragmatic bias are founded in reality. After all, they’re going off what they’ve seen, and they’ve never seen the US elect a female president. But luckily we live in a world in which things that haven’t happened before happen all the time. And as the authors of this pragmatic bias research have found, these doubts can “be overcome by credibly signaling others’ willingness to act collectively.”

Let us know what you think by voting in our poll and leaving an anonymous comment.

💭 Our two cents

The forces at play when it comes to determining whether and when we’ll actually get to use the phrase Madam President IRL are (sadly) far too complex for us to fully unpack in somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 words. If we were able to pull that off, you’d probably be looking at not just the first female US president, but the first two female co-presidents the country has ever seen. (Honestly, it doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world…writing NTP has prepared us well, we swear). But if you’re asking us, we’ve got a lot of money on a female presidency being a “when” thing, not a “whether” thing. And if for some godforsaken reason it’s not something we see in our lifetimes, we’ll probably be welcoming the afterlife with open arms.

But in all seriousness, I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t many times before fallen into the trap of just throwing my arms up / rolling my eyes / [insert defeatist body language here] and saying “I just don’t think the country will ever think a woman is likable or electable or presidential enough to be president.” So for me, the most useful and interesting piece of research we explored above is not the personal bias that some undoubtedly harbor against female politicians (consciously or subconsciously), but rather the pragmatic bias we might all hold. Perhaps without fully realizing it, we may collectively shy away from candidates we actually want to vote for just because we’re worried other people won’t want to vote for them, too. On one hand, it’s so understandable to let the doubts – “people just won’t vote for a woman” – creep into your head, especially after you hear a pundit talk for 7 minutes about the implications of a pantsuit choice of someone who might literally soon be the leader of the free world. But it might also be worth reminding ourselves that accepting these doubts as truth may actually be harming the very outcome we so hope for.

So, my takeaways? Yeah, getting elected president of the United States is extremely challenging, and for a woman? More challenging. For sure. But do I think deep down that a large enough portion of the country is too sexist to elect a woman on the basis of her gender? I’ll take them at their word and say no. And if believing these statements could actually, collectively make even a small difference – could give more women the confidence to run, could generate more fundraising for female candidates, could drive parties to tap more women for open seats – then, personally, that’s a perspective shift I’d like to make.

💃 The girls have spoken

See last week’s poll results from “So...can you really just be friends with someone of the opposite sex?” below. :)

💌 Up Next

That’s all for today! If you liked this edition of Not That Personal, we think one of your friends probably will too – refer one (or two or three) below.

Have something to say? We’d love to hear it – reply to this email or leave an anonymous comment here.

See you next week ;)

💖 S & J