Moderating effect of partisanship on personal experience with sexual harassment and gender discrimination on the evaluation of political figures

ABSTRACT

Sexual harassment and gender discrimination have become more salient in U.S. politics in recent years due, in part, to the #MeToo movement. We conducted two surveys on Californians in the 2018 primary and general election. We find that experiencing either of these types of interactions shaped how Independent voters evaluated political figures but had a smaller effect on Democratic and Republican party identifiers. On average, experiencing gender discrimination has stronger effects on the evaluation of political figures than sexual harassment. Both experiences played out differently for Independent men and Independent women. The boost in female support for Democratic candidates was counterbalanced by a backlash vote from Independent men who reported they experienced gender discrimination, aiding the President and hurting Democratic political figures. This suggests that the pro-Kavanaugh backlash had deeper roots in male resentment towards the perceived preferential treatment of women, especially in work environments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On its website, EEOC states that “(u)nwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.” Sexual harassment can happen to both men and women. The victim or harasser may be of the same sex. Many institutions have adopted training programs and rules that prohibit sexual harassment, but, despite universal condemnation, sexual harassment remains pervasive in multiple fields and even in prestigious professions (Coombs and King 2005).

According to the EEOC, gender discrimination “involves treating someone unfavorably because of that person’s sex”. Gender discrimination also violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In the workplace, “the law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.” Gender discrimination can exist in multiple forms. In the workplace, it is commonly manifested through wage differentiation and differential job responsibilities. In 2016, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported a 20% wage gap, that is, a full-time employed female worker only makes 80.5 cents for every dollar earned by men. In a survey of the 2018 Fortune 500 list, only 24 companies have female CEOs.

2 The poll was conducted by a non-profit called “Stop Street Harassment”. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/21/587671849/a-new-survey-finds-eighty-percent-of-women-have-experienced-sexual-harassment

3 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/14/gender-discrimination-comes-in-many-forms-for-todays-working-women/

4 https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/Most-Important-Problem.aspx

5 There are several variables that may be relevant to our inquiry but are not in our statistical models, such as social media use. Skewed media use may strengthen partisan perceptual biases (Druckman and Parkin 2005; Kahn and Kenney 2002; Dalton, Beck, and Huckfeldt 1998) and mold the way that personal experiences translate into political evaluations (Mutz 1992, 1994). A voter’s general level of political information may also matter. Examining the extent to which personal unemployment experiences influence presidential approval, Mutz (1992, 1993) finds that well-informed voters are more likely to connect personal experiences with political preferences. Other studies also conclude that greater politicization of personal experiences is more likely to occur among the less informed or those who are less well-off (Weatherford 1983; Brody and Sniderman 1977; Myers et al. 2013). However, both social media use and political sophistication were not measured in our survey due to space limitations.

6 About 10% of respondents answered both the primary and general election surveys. Since their responses about their experiences with harassment or discrimination could change between elections, we retained these respondents in our sample.

7 The frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full 2016 American Community Survey 1-year sample with selection within strata by sampling with replacements. The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The scores were then post-stratified on 2016 presidential vote choice, and a four-way stratification of gender, age, race and education to create the final survey weight.

8 Results from these questions are reported in the Online Appendix.

9 One of Brown’s senior staff was accused of sexual misconduct. Brown’s office, however, denied knowledge of his staff’s sexual misconduct when Brown appointed him as the assistant deputy secretary for administrative affairs at the California Department of Veterans Affairs. For more, see https://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-senate-staffer-accused-of-sexual-1517615006-htmlstory.html

10 https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article218830265.html

11 https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/30/california-becomes-first-state-to-require-a-woman-on-corporate-boards/

12 We also used ordinal logistic regression. Since the results are almost identical to that using OLS regression, we will report the OLS results in this paper as they are easier to interpret.