Biden’s soon-to-be-announced running mate, along with many women running in state and local elections, will have a different electoral experience than her male colleagues. Women candidates face double-standards upheld by voters, donors, competitors, and the media. These biases may be unconscious, but until we name it, we can’t change it. This series will be an effort to identify problems and find solutions through a discussion of personal experiences, interviews with experts, and some cold, hard research. Let’s start with research on media coverage.
Coverage of the 2020 Presidential Election
On March 5, a New York Times headline asked, “Was It Always Going to Be the Last Men Standing?” The story begins with a grim declaration, “In the end, the pink wave carried two white men ashore.” Lisa Lerner’s analysis of the election reads like a eulogy for a historic election cycle that ushered an unprecedented number of women into Congress and the race for President. Despite gains in 2018, women make up only 29.1% of state legislators, 28.9% of statewide executives, and 23.7% of Congress, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. And, this year, Americans will end another decade without learning how many women need to hit the country’s highest glass ceiling before it breaks.
Women who embark on the inherently difficult race for elected office are instantly handicapped by definitions of likeability and electability that are often appear mutually exclusive. While there are many contributing factors, I’m focusing here on how media treatment of female candidates contributes to the double standards that women navigate.
Storybench, a project by Northeastern University, recently showed how these centuries-old problems still occur in today’s coverage. Their analysis of 130 recent articles found that “female candidates running for president are consistently being described in the media more negatively than their male counterparts.” Of course, one reason for the coverage disparity could be that women candidates had more scandals than their male counterparts in this 2020 race. But, according to Meredith Conroy, a professor at California State at San Bernardino, the disparity could also result from how society perceives women.
For example, when Donald Trump hovered over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Debates, many of us thought it was overly aggressive, but it wasn’t the top story of the night. On the contrary, if Hillary had followed him closely on the stage that night, it would have likely been bigger news. As Conroy argues, “In a world where femininity is too often aligned with weakness or timidness, failure to conform to those stereotypes can result in differences in public perceptions.”
Another study by Diana Zulli found that “women in politics … need to be masculine enough to demonstrate competence and leadership, but feminine enough to align with gender stereotypes.” Further, “If female politicians embrace their femininity, they are perceived as incompetent and are more subject to gendered media coverage.”
According to Storybench, this gendered coverage may be positive in nature yet focusing on personal issues, which “can subconsciously push forth ideas on who is actually a formidable candidate.” By contrast, when compared to their male counterparts, women’s policy proposals, which are opportunities to show competence received less coverage.
For example, coverage of Elizabeth Warren’s policy heavy campaign was regularly focused on her likeability and her ancestry test instead of her proposals. According to Conroy, this type of coverage can be classified as “soft sexism” because it reinforces existing stereotypes and disproportionately hurts female candidates.
Why Does it Matter?
Ultimately, coverage inequities matters because they discourage women from running for office and shape voter judgments. According to the CAWP, “Journalists serve as ‘character judges’ who scrutinize leaders through gendered notions of authenticity.” But, unlike voters, audiences, or politicians, journalists and news organizations are trained to avoid bias. In many instances, we can see the press actively working to eliminate gendered language, yet women candidates are still treated differently. This problem is complicated by journalist’s relationships with an audience who holds ingrained beliefs about gender and their own lived experiences.
Diversifying the newsroom, building lists of female experts, and implicit bias training are a few of the ways that the media can continue to tackle this problem, and I’ll write more about that in later posts. Some outlets are already working on it. Making a conscious effort to diversify the voices, from sources to subjects to journalists, that are promoted by a news organization is a difficult but necessary action. But, as voters and media consumers, we also have a responsibility.
Studies of election coverage show that the audience dictates coverage more than either the journalist or the candidate. When a news organization’s profit is structured around audience tastes and click-optimizations, it’s a risk to deviate from the status quo. In a later post, I’ll discuss why taking that risk would be in the organization’s long-term interest.
For now, as election coverage ramps us, we should all think more critically about the stories we read, seek, and expect on female candidates. Knowing that there is a documented double-standard and a bias that we all have some responsibility for correcting, we can start simply by asking, how would this story be different if the candidate’s gender was different?