We’ve known for decades that unconscious biases shape our perceptions of men and women in the workplace. But what happens when we bring those biases to the voting booth during a presidential election?
Of course, there isn’t much data to go off of, since Vice President Harris is only the second woman to seek the Oval Office after Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful bid in 2016. Complicating this question further is the fact that you can’t simply ask Americans if they think gender matters in a presidential race, because how we perceive gender largely occurs subconsciously.
Take, for example, a Pew poll from last year, which found that most Americans believe gender does not matter when it comes to doing the job of president. Of the minority who thought gender would play a role, most believed that a woman would outperform a man in the Oval Office in myriad ways. For instance, this group believes that a female president would conduct herself more ethically than a man and work better under pressure.
And yet, decades of research on unconscious bias suggests we cannot take these polls at face value.
Want proof? Well, consider the following well-known experiment conducted by Frank Flyn and Cameron Anderson at Columbia Business School and New York University. Flyn and Anderson asked a classroom of business school students to evaluate the CV of a highly successful female entrepreneur. Only, one group saw the candidate’s real first name, Heidi, and the other saw a man’s name, Howard.
The result was stunning — at least it was in 2003, when the experiment was conducted. Both groups of students deemed the candidates to be highly competent, but Heidi was perceived to be aggressive and selfish, whereas Howard was perceived to be likable.
Research like Flyn and Anderson’s illuminates a frustrating reality: Women, especially those in leadership roles, are often deemed either competent but cold or warm but incompetent. When men, in contrast, are seen as warm, their intelligence is rarely questioned. When men are competent, even stern, they are not typically perceived as being cold. None of this, of course, happens consciously.
We saw this gender bias play out in 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to win a major party's nomination for president.
Much of the criticism leveled at Clinton was directed at her personality as opposed to her policies. She was ridiculed for being overly prepared and scripted during the debates. She didn’t smile enough, some said. In a quote for The Guardian, Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, remarked that Clinton “reminds people of their mothers, or the schoolteacher they didn’t like.”
In the eyes of the American electorate, Clinton was cold and competent.
Of course, with a sample size of just one, it’s tough to attribute America’s view of Clinton solely to gender bias, despite how neatly it seems to fit within the cold-competent / warm-incompetent frame.
So, what to make of Harris’s nascent campaign?
Unlike Clinton, the vice president is unabashedly warm. Her campaign is strategically centered on "joy" and "good vibes." She laughs loudly — just like her mother, she’ll proudly remark. She embraces her grand-nieces and regales voters with stories of the quality time they spend together, eating bacon around the kitchen table.
And already, many Republicans have decided that Harris is warm and incompetent, despite her excellent credentials.
One of the pillars of Donald Trump’s emerging smear campaign against Harris, alongside openly racist and sexist remarks, are jabs at her intelligence. Trump has called Harris “dumb as a rock,” and this messaging seems to be resonating with at least some faction of right-leaning voters and pundits.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, for instance, tweeted, “The dirty secret of the Kamala Harris campaign is that Kamala Harris is a stupid person,” following Harris’s first major interview as the Democratic nominee, with CNN’s Dana Bash.
While criticism of Harris’s intelligence may be warranted, at the very least we should be conscious of the pattern that appears to be emerging, and how it seems to confirm what researchers have told us about unconscious gender bias for decades.
What’s more, you have to wonder why criticism of Clinton’s coldness and Harris’s alleged incompetence struck a chord, when similar critiques of the political opponent they now share — Teflon Don — seem only to ricochet off him.
After all, Trump lies to his voter base constantly. He also openly mocked a disabled journalist, boasted about groping a woman and, for no apparent reason, slighted Medal of Honor recipients for being injured in battle. Not to mention that he incited a riot on the Capitol building that delayed certification of the 2020 election and threatened more than 230 years of American democracy.
That’s pretty darn cold.
Then there’s the fact that Trump made ridiculous suggestions for curing COVID, confused 9/11 with 7/11, called Thailand “Thighland” and remarked that “we just got back from the Middle East” upon arriving in Israel from Saudi Arabia.
That’s pretty darn incompetent.
It makes you wonder, if Trump were a woman and Harris a man, would we still be in a deadlocked race?
Jonah Prousky is a management consultant and freelance writer based in Toronto, Canada.
