Gender Role Violations and Voter Prejudice: The Agentic Penalty Faced by Women Politicians

ABSTRACT

Role Congruity Theory (RCT) broadly suggests that when women step into leadership roles, they violate the expectations of their role as women. This article uses RCT to develop and directly test theories related to which types of gender stereotype role violations might cause voter bias toward women politicians. We argue and find that voter prejudice most likely results from an agentic incongruity–punishing a woman candidate who violates her gender role by displaying agentic, dominant traits such as being intimidating or arrogant. Backlash for this type of role violation is strong when the election context favors male stereotypical strengths.

KEYWORDS:

• Role congruity
• women in politics
• role violations
• gender stereotypes

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Nichole Bauer, Laurie Rudman, and Howie Lavine for their comments as well as the Gender and Political Psychology Writing Group. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota and the Personality, Candidates, Traits, and Leaders Conference at Memorial University.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2021.1981095.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. We did not allow a middle option to avoid social desirability bias (Streb et al. 2008). Moreover, making a binary choice between candidates most closely mimics the vote choice situation.

2. Effect sizes are often preferable to tests of significance since small but substantively meaningless differences can be significant simply because of a large sample size.

3. This type of difference measure is used fruitfully in other research, notably affective polarization research (e.g., Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012).

4. We might argue that instead of prejudice, the woman candidate has an advantage. The language of prejudice is most consistent with theory and other findings that women are penalized.

5. Alpha(men) = 0.898, alpha(politicians) = 0.857, alpha(women) = 0.865.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the Stamps Family Charitable Foundation through an enrichment scholarship given to DiFilippo.

Notes on contributors

Monica C. Schneider

Monica C. Schneider is Professor of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her research focuses on gender in politics, including gender stereotypes of political candidates, gender differences in political ambition, and how campaign training affects women. Her work appears in many journals including Political Psychology, American Politics Research, and Journal of Politics, Groups, and Identities. She has been awarded the Gender and Political Psychology’s (GPP) Mid-Career Impact Award.

Angela L. Bos

Angela L. Bos is Professor of Political Science at the College of Wooster. Her research and teaching in U.S. politics focuses on women in politics, political psychology, political socialization, and campaigns and elections. She has published in many journals including Political Psychology, Political Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, and American Political Science Review. She has been awarded the Elsie Hillman Prize and the Gender and Political Psychology’s (GPP) Mid-Career Impact Award.

Madeline DiFilippo

Madeline DiFilippo is a certified public accountant who works in the finance department of a nonprofit in Cincinnati and recently earned a Master of Public Administration degree from Northern Kentucky University. She graduated summa cum laude from Miami University where she earned a B.A. in Political Science and a B.S. in Business with an Accountancy major. Madeline was a Stamps Scholar as an undergraduate, which provided her the opportunity to study abroad and fund research, among other enriching activities.