Watching Election 2016 with a Gender Lens

Abstract

The presence of women candidates in both major parties’ presidential primaries, including a likely woman Democratic nominee, has increased the attention paid to gender dynamics in the 2016 US presidential election. However, the presumption that previous presidential elections—without female prominent contenders—were gender neutral is false: gender dynamics have been at play in all US presidential elections to date. The nation’s top executive office is arguably the most masculine in American politics. Duerst-Lahti (1997) describes the presidency as a gendered space in which masculine norms and images are reified as the ideal, adding, “the masculinist assumption-made-normal is strong and is made even stronger when it goes unnoticed for its gendered aspects” (22). Presidents and presidential contenders, whether male or female, are expected to meet the masculine expectations of the office through words and actions, and those around them—family, spouses, and advisors—often play a role in shaping the degree to which they are successful. In navigating American politics, candidates also face gendered treatment by opponents, voters, and media, reminding us that presidential politics is far from gender neutral. These gender dynamics have been detailed by scholars, particularly in analyses of the presidential candidacies of women (Beail and Longworth 2013; Carlin and Winfrey 2009; Carroll and Dittmar 2009; Dittmar and Carroll 2013; Duerst-Lahti 2013; Falk 2010; Han and Heldman 2007; Heldman, Carroll, and Olson 2005; Lawrence and Rose 2009; McClain, Carter, and Brady 2005). However, the depth and nuance in scholarly analyses are rarely evident in popular dialogue about the ways in which gender shapes presidential elections.

Evaluating Claims of Intersectionality

“…Overall, our results support the idea that gender and race interact to determine Republican support. To the extent that our simple model is a good one, our results support prior research showing that gender doesn't play a significant role in determining Republican support among White people (Dittmar, 2016;Strolovitch, Wong and Proctor, 2017;Junn, 2017;Cassese and Barnes, 2019;Junn and Masuoka, 2020). They also highlight how gender exacerbates the negative effect of race on Republican support.…”

Circling the Wagons: How Perceived Injustice Increases Female Bureaucrats’ Support for Female Political Leaders

“…Other work theorizes that it is because female politicians promote issues that are of greater importance to women (Paolino 1995) or that they represent an appealing “outsider” image during elections when voters generally are dissatisfied with the status quo (Dolan 1998). However, in general, this literature is inconclusive and generally finds that women's support for women candidates is not uniform and is highly context specific (Dittmar 2016).…”

Wanting, and Weighting: White Women and Descriptive Representation in the 2016 Presidential Election

“…First, the empirical reality at the heart of the present analysis—53% of White women in the 2016 presidential election had the opportunity to vote for a descriptive representative based on gender and race, and did not. As several scholars and journalists have noted, White women have voted in the majority for the Republican presidential candidate in most elections going back several decades (Dittmar 2017; Junn 2017). That observed history is insufficient reason to dismiss the voting choices of White women in 2016 as mere reflections of partisanship that are divorced from their identities as women.…”