In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Samantha Chapa, covers the new article by Christopher F. Karpowitz, J. Quin Monson, Jessica R. Preece, and Alejandra Aldridge, Brigham Young University, “Selecting for Masculinity: Women’s Under-Representation in the Republican Party.“
In a recent APSR article, Karpowitz, Monson, Preece, and Aldrige disentangle the relationship between gender and sex to show that notions of gender, rather than sex, largely determine Republican support for candidates. Current studies in the field attempt to determine levels of support for women candidates through experiments by making hypothetical profiles of men and women candidates the same, only changing candidate sex. Typically, these studies show that people support both men and women at equal levels. However, this still leaves us with the puzzle of why Republican candidates are overwhelmingly men, especially in higher-profile elections.
Early work in feminist and queer studies differentiates between gender and sex, where gender relates to the socially constructed roles we ascribe to men and women based on power and politics, and sex refers to the biological and physical attributes that distinguish men and women. Gender can range from “feminine” to “masculine” and can end up being tied to social stratification and hierarchies of power.
Differences in gender manifest themselves in several prominent ways that may have an effect on political candidacies: stratification in the workforce, emphasis on communal or agentic traits, and issue preferences and priorities. More feminine politicians tend to have backgrounds in nursing, education, NGOs, or homemaking and emphasize communal traits and issues like education. Those with perceived masculine backgrounds tend to come from law, business, and agriculture and conversely emphasize their individuality and agency and issues like taxes. Those who are more masculine can be either men or women and the same holds for those who are more feminine.
As the Republican Party has become tightly linked with masculinity over the years, to achieve success, Republican women candidates must emphasize masculinity and prioritize masculine topics. However, the need to emphasize masculinity places women in what’s known as a “double bind,” where it is difficult for women to be perceived as both competent and likable simultaneously—the key to winning elections. If women break feminine stereotypes, they are
unlikeable but competent. If women candidates emphasize their feminine traits, they are perceived as likable but not as competent. These interlocking conceptions of gender and sex place women candidates in a difficult position. Women must be neither overly masculine nor overly feminine.
“Gender bias has serious downstream effects, as it limits the types of policies that women can support and the substantive representation of women on issues like healthcare, access to contraception, and pay disparity.”As the authors show, women who deviate from this tightrope are penalized politically, especially among Republicans. The authors asked respondents to compare profiles of candidates, which differ in terms of gender and sex and range in career background and life experiences. For example, one candidate is the “supermom,” who toes the line between masculinity and femininity. She is an engineer or a bank vice president who cares about taxes and the budget, but also volunteers at her kids’ school. This candidate is seen as the most competent woman candidate among Republicans, and even more so among the most conservative of Republicans. The other women candidates that are either too masculine or too feminine do poorly in comparison, as they are either only likable or competent, but not both. Democrats, conversely, tend to see a wider range of women candidates as both likable and competent.
The authors further investigate this relationship by testing different gender traits, such as career and attention to family among men candidates and find that men with more feminine traits tend to suffer from the likability versus competency double bind, perhaps even more than women. They then test the applicability of these experimental findings through a study in which they analyze candidate speeches in neighborhood Republican Party caucus meetings. Their qualitative findings corroborate the experiments. Women who tend to be either overly feminine or masculine are less successful in winning these local, entry-level elections, which ultimately shapes their political careers and the pool of candidates in more consequential elections.
Conventional wisdom on partisan politics maintains that Republicans tend to express higher levels of sexism compared to Democrats but that their choices as voters do not contribute to the underrepresentation of women in American politics. The authors challenge this prevailing notion to show that vote choice, particularly early in the electoral pipeline, affects women’s representation at all levels, including local, state, and federal elections because sex and gender are so highly correlated in the real world.
When we see women candidates achieve success in the Republican Party, they have already performed this gender balancing act and succeeded at achieving the winning blend of masculinity and femininity in the local context. Given that gender is a spectrum, this poses a serious challenge to women’s representation in American politics—only certain women can achieve electoral success in the Republican Party. Gender bias has serious downstream effects, as it limits the types of policies that women can support and the substantive representation of women on issues like healthcare, access to contraception, and pay disparity. To the detriment of women across the U.S., gender bias in vote choice results in lasting political consequences, starting subtly at the precinct level.
- Samantha Chapa is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston. Her National Science Foundation-funded research focuses broadly on the political rights and representation of migrants and people of color. Her dissertation examines the impacts of local, urban policies on immigrant and minoritized groups. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Politics and East European Politics and Societies. Prior to graduate school, she worked at BakerRipley—a non-profit—for three years, where she engaged in immigrant legal defense work. She completed her Bachelor’s in English and History at Rice University.
- Article details: KARPOWITZ, CHRISTOPHER F., J. QUIN MONSON, JESSICA R. PREECE, and ALEJANDRA ALDRIDGE. 2024. “Selecting for Masculinity: Women’s Under-Representation in the Republican Party.” , American Political Science Review, 1-22.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.
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