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Do Female Candidates Still Face a “Double Bind”?

- June 22, 2011

As Michele Bachmann continues to attract “increasing”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/path-to-the-nomination-michele-bachmann/2011/03/29/AGjpZ4eH_blog.html “attention”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/us/politics/22bachmann.html?_r=1&ref=politics following her performance in “last week’s Republican presidential debate”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/campaigns/analysis-bachmanns-debate-debut-could-complicate-any-gop-deal-with-obama-on-debt-limit/2011/06/15/AGq1JaVH_story.html, questions will once again be asked about the unique challenges facing female candidates running for political office in the United States.

One of these challenges is known as the “double bind”. As with men, if women do not appear to be tough enough to handle the challenges of office, they are likely to suffer in the eyes of the voters. However, women are thought to face an additional challenge: if they appear too tough, then they can be seen as violating gender stereotypes, and thus that could conceivably hurt them in the eyes of voters. Thus women are essentially assumed to be caught between a rock and a hard place here in a way that men are not.

Recent research by “Deborah Brooks of Dartmouth College”:http://www.dartmouth.edu/~govt/faculty/brooksd.html, however, casts doubt on the continuing existence of this double bind, at least according to her own experimental analysis. In a prize winning paper delivered at the 2010 American Political Science Association annual meeting, Brooks finds that women are _not_ penalized from appearing to be “tougher”, at least not within the context of having this toughness reported on in the print media. Here’s the abstract from the paper:

The conventional wisdom is that female politicians are greatly constrained by a toughness-related double bind: if a woman fails to demonstrate toughness, she confirms a stereotype that women are not strong enough to lead; yet if she demonstrates toughness, she will be disliked for violating gendered expectations. Although this double-bind is commonly seen as a principal challenge facing women on the campaign trail, political scientists have neglected to evaluate this issue empirically. With a large-N, representative sample of U.S. adults, this study utilizes a survey-based experiment to thoroughly test the conventional wisdom. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, female politicians do not suffer a disproportionate penalty for acting in a tough manner; in fact, this analysis shows that tough women benefit on several key measures relative to tough men.

It would be interesting to see if this finding holds up when transferred to audio-visual media, which is likely to be the primary way in which most voters become acquainted with Ms. Bachmann. One could imagine that these kind of gender stereotypes in terms of behavioral expectations would be more easily offended by visual cues than by print media. But either way, the findings certainly cast doubt on the received wisdom concerning the double bind.

The full paper can be downloaded here. An updated version of the paper, which will appear as a chapter in Brooks’ forthcoming “Princeton University Press”:http://press.princeton.edu/ book _He Runs, She Runs: Gender Stereotypes, Double Standards, and Political Campaigns_, can be found “here”:http://genderandpolipsych.com/files/newresearch/ckfinder/files/DBrooks%20TOUGH%20BOOK%20CHAPTER%20Feb%2018%202010%20vers.pdf.