Abstract
Media coverage and subsequent journalistic analyses of the 2008 US presidential elections suggest gender biases harmed both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. As a means of verifying ‘common knowledge’ on gender stereotypes and voters’ perceptions, Deborah Brooks asks: ‘Do women running for office face tougher expectations by the public regarding their qualifications and behaviour than male candidates do? If so, does that contribute to the parity problem?’ (p. 8).
To answer this question, Brooks uses a representative sample of 3,000 respondents (p. 12), drawn from the YouGov database, to test experiments based on the Golberg paradigm design (p. 45). Based on this design, Brooks presented respondents with articles about female and male fictitious candidates that had exactly the same characteristics, except for their gender. As such, six aspects of campaigns – candidate experience, crying, anger, toughness, lack of empathy and knowledge gaffes during the campaign (p. 51) – were interacted with gender and analysed in regard to their impact on ‘overall favourability, likely effectiveness in Senate, and likely effectiveness as US president’ (p. 54), as well as their perceived ‘issue competencies’ (such as knowledge of the economy) and ‘personal traits’ (p. 55).
Brooks’ conclusions are optimistic: gender stereotypes are still in place, but they do not disproportionately hurt the electoral chances of female candidates. Also, contrary to journalistic accounts, Brooks does not find evidence to support the suggestion that women are penalised for ‘violating gendered prescriptive stereotypes’ (p. 144), and even that inexperienced female candidates have a slight advantage over inexperienced men.
Brooks’ writing is clear and exciting, which means the book contributes not only to the scholarly literature on women and politics, but also to the overall non-academic discussion of the topic. Perhaps precisely because of this attempt to connect to a non-academic audience, however, the book seems to bear a disconnected design: it is motivated and framed in regard to the presidential elections, but undertakes analyses at the legislative level. The reader is also left to wonder whether findings could be biased as a result of using YouGov, a self-selection platform for population sampling, or by respondents’ knowledge of the intent of the study (an issue Brooks briefly discusses on p. 170).
Brooks’ work is aligned with recent findings on voter behaviour and candidate gender, and is well timed and placed within the literature's growing understanding of the relationship between gender biases and descriptive representation. It also succeeds in combining non-academic discourse with methodological rigour, thus potentially satisfying a large and diverse audience.