I’ve been kind of shocked at the outpouring of love I’ve been seeing for Kamala Harris all over social media in the last day.
So many people seem so sad that she dropped out. So many people have so many amazing things to say about her.
That is understandable: Kamala Harris is amazing. She would have made an amazing president.
The shocking part is: where were all these people when Kamala was actually running??
Not to say that Kamala didn’t have her supporters. She did and they were (and are) amazing.
But so many people who DIDN’T say one positive word about her publicly are all of a sudden sharing their love for her.
It’s like people like her MORE now that she is NOT running.
Of course they do.
People ALWAYS like women more when they aren’t seeking higher office.
Check out this Harvard University research:
Research suggests that we like women less when they are seeking power.
here is what they hypothesized
Because power and power-seeking are central to the way masculinity is socially constructed and communality is central to the construction of femininity, intentionally seeking power is broadly seen as anti-communal and inconsistent with the societal rules for women’s behavior.
the authors suggest that women’s power-seeking will evoke emotional reactions of contempt and disgust and therefore voters will be less likely to support their candidacy.
and here is what they found
Voters are less likely to vote for female politicians when they perceive them as power-seeking, though male politicians are not penalized.
- When participants saw male politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having greater agency (i.e., being more assertive, stronger, and tougher) and greater competence, while this was not true for their perceptions of power-seeking female politicians.
- When participants saw female politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having less communality (i.e., being unsupportive and uncaring), while this was not true for their perceptions of power-seeking male politicians.
- When female politicians were described as power-seeking, participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust) towards them.
- Participant gender had no impact on any of the study outcomes – that is, women were just as likely as men to have negative reactions to power-seeking female politicians.
In short, both a power-seeking image and expressed power-seeking intent can bias voters against female politicians.
and we don’t need studies to prove this to us (although they help). We saw this with Hillary Clinton
Over the course of her long career, the public’s views of Mrs. Clinton have shifted along with her public role.
every time Hillary ran for office, she was hated. When she held office, she was loved. And this chart doesn’t even include what happened to her in 2016:
It is hard to remember how loved HRC was because of how hated she became when she ran for President, but she was loved. Because: America loves women like Hillary Clinton–as long as they’re not asking for a promotion
It’s hard to remember these days, but just a few years ago, everybody loved Hillary Rodham Clinton. When she stepped down as US secretary of state in January 2013 after four years in office, her approval rating stood at what the Wall Street Journal described as an “eye-popping” 69%. That made her not only the most popular politician in the country, but the second-most popular secretary of state since 1948.
The 2012 “Texts from Hillary” meme, which featured a sunglasses-clad Clinton scrolling through her Blackberry aboard a military flight to Libya, had given rise to a flood of think pieces hailing her “badass cool.” The Washington Post wanted president Barack Obama to give vice president Joe Biden the boot and replace him with Clinton. Taking stock of Clinton’s approval ratings, Nate Silver noted in a 2012 piece for the New York Times that she currently held “remarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked.”
What happened? She sought power. And (remember the Harvard study I linked to earlier) we hate women who seek power.
How can we reconcile the “unlikable” Democratic presidential candidate of today with the adored politician of recent history? It’s simple: Public opinion of Clinton has followed a fixed pattern throughout her career. Her public approval plummets whenever she applies for a new position. Then it soars when she gets the job. The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power.
This is true about Elizabeth Warren too. Back in 2016, when HRC was our candidate the standard response of every progressive person who refused to support her was “I am not sexist, I’d love if Elizabeth Warren ran! I just hate HRC.” There were even articles written about it:
Elizabeth Warren Is Everyone’s Political Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada
this looooooong election cycle is chock-full of interesting data, especially regarding unexamined sexist attitudes. To me, nothing sums that up better than a sentence I’ve seen repeated hundreds if not thousands of times on social media, mostly from people called out on problematic statements regarding women. That sentence is, “I would happily be voting for Elizabeth Warren.”
Elizabeth Warren is everyone’s political girlfriend who lives in Canada. She’s the perfect female candidate for president in 2016 in that she isn’t actually running, and thus her danger to the patriarchal power system is just a thought exercise rather than the reality embodied in Clinton. Because Warren decided not to run, it is perfectly safe to project all our hopes for a liberal utopia on her and dump all our vague anxieties regarding the rise of a woman to the last great seat of traditionally male power on Clinton. It’s win-win because it's imaginary and we control all the variables.
And those men who promised they would be all over Elizabeth Warren? I don’t know about you, but in my social world they all seem pretty in love with Bernie or Pete instead. Now, all of a sudden, there is just something they don’t like as much about Warren…. They can’t seem to quite articulate it.
But I know a Harvard study that can: People are uncomfortable with women seeking power.
What can be done about this? Well, in this election cycle, we can try reframing Warren (or other women seeking power) as people who want to take care of us or take care America or take care of the world. Put it in terms people are comfortable with and you might win converts.
There is a reason Warren spends hour after hour meeting with people and taking selfies and releasing videos of her being kind and emphatic. Women seeking power have to keep reminding us (over and over) that they are still kind and caring.
It is bullshit but it is what needs to be done. It is like how Obama could never show anger or be labeled as an angry Black man. It was bullshit — but it had to be done.
So that is some of what we can do in this election cycle if we want to support women, but what about on a personal level?
And if you are one of those people (and it affects men and women equally) who finds her or himself liking women less when they are running as compared to when they are not, you need to dig deep and face this uncomfortable truth. The first step towards changing these things is acknowledging them.
Because the truth is this sucks. Watching Kamala Harris drop out when there a half dozen mediocre White guys still running makes my blood boil.
Let’s be better than this.