科学美国人60秒:Women Candidates Face Implicit Bias Hurdle

“In general, even those who purport to have very egalitarian view or even feminist views of the world, when they were taking this test, it’s called the Implicit Association Test…people are struggling to really associate women with leadership words.”

Political scientist Cecilia Hyunjung Mo of Vanderbilt University. She measured what’s known as the implicit bias of some 400 study participants. When they saw an image of a man, the subjects were more likely to pair that picture with words like “president” and “executive.” But when they saw a female, they chose words like “assistant” and “aide.”

Mo then asked the volunteers how they would vote in two-person races. Those who were least likely to associate images of women with words associated with leadership “often chose the male candidate over the female candidate when I intentionally set it up so that the two candidates were equally qualified…and sometimes I made the women slightly more qualified. The association was a little weaker so that that qualification did help her, but not as much as I would have hoped. And if I made the male candidate slightly more qualified then he sort of overwhelmed people’s preferences. They were actually explicitly saying, yes, I’m happy to have a female president but simultaneously they were struggling on this test to really see a woman as a leader and that was translating to candidate preferences.”

The research is in the journal Political Behavior. [Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, The Consequences of Explicit and Implicit Gender Attitudes and Candidate Quality in the Calculations of Voters]

“This study at least starts showing that on average when you don’t have a lot of information about policy you actually need to have a female candidate that is so obviously more qualified than the male candidate that she can overcome that hurdle…people can learn, but that’s not going to happen if people don’t actually run. If women don’t put themselves out there then there is not going to be an example of what a woman leader can look like. And it’s those examples that need to be created so that people become much more comfortable with what a leader looks like.”

—Erika Beras