On Election Day, Donald Trump beat the second woman to ever win a major-party nomination for the presidency — just eight years after he beat the first. Did Kamala Harris’ loss this year, and Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, have anything to do with their gender? Or was it something else? We asked a group of leading women in journalism, politics and academia to explain why a woman has still not been elected president in the United States.
There is plenty of evidence that voters could have gendered biases that factored into their votes in 2016 and 2024, and our contributors know it well. One pointed to studies in which participants judged a personnel file with a woman’s name as less competent than that with a man’s name — and then, when more information was included to show her superior competence, the same participants found her more competent but less likeable.
There were others, though, who thought that gender might be at play, but not necessarily in a way that would make voters less likely to vote for a woman. “Harris didn’t lose the election because she’s a woman, but she was put into the position to lose this election because she was a woman,” one former Trump official wrote.
Many of the women blamed a mix — gender, yes, but gender combined with the Democratic Party’s failure to win working-class men and how voters see the party in general. “No woman in the United States has yet been able to clear that bar,” one contributor wrote. “The first to do so may well come from the right.”
Read here the full article published by Politico on 15 November 2024.
Image by Politico
