Gender Biases and 2020 Nomination

In the 2020 Democratic Primary six women announced their candidacy for President of the United States. However, on March fifth Senator Elizabeth Warren announced that she would end her campaign. This announcement confirmed that the next Democratic presidential nominee would be a man. Since the United States was founded there has only been one female presidential candidate from a major political party. Female candidates have difficulty being nominated because many members of the public perceive them as unpresidential, unelectable, and unlikeable. No matter how a female candidate presents herself it is likely that she will face at least one or more of these roadblocks. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was criticized for being too passive and not being tough enough to be the president. Senator Kamala Harris was criticized for being too aggressive especially in her treatment towards Joe Biden and she was framed as being unlikable. Both Senator Klobuchar and Senator Warren received support from important institutions such as the New York Times, but the public did not feel that they were going to be able to beat Donald Trump. This perception existed even though both Warren and Klobuchar were leading Donald Trump in early polls. Many of Donald Trump’s supports admire his rhetoric even though it isn’t presidential and is impolite. This demonstrates that female candidates are held to unrealistic standards that male candidates do not have to face. These standards that only apply to women have made it very difficult for female candidates to get nominated by political parties.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/06/opinions/sexism-2020-election-opinion-hunt/index.html

            Kendall D. Funk, Magda Hinojosa, and Jennifer M. Piscopo have done research on women being nominated by political parties and have found that there are biases that can increase the number of women being nominated. The authors of the article demonstrate that voters think of candidates in gendered terms. Typically, this is seen as a disadvantage for women because as mentioned earlier they are given characteristics that hurt their electability. However, in this article the authors demonstrate that there are political circumstances that make parties more likely to nominate female candidates. During times of corruption and crisis the parties are more likely to nominate women because they are seen as more honest and less corrupt to the public. During these times female stereotypes are helping women become nominated compared to when time are normal. The tests that were conducted for this study took place in different Latin American countries. The work of these authors prove that gender biases exist, and they generally have a negative affect in nominating women, but there are contexts where these biases help nominate women.

https://learningsuite.byu.edu/plugins/Upload/fileDownload.php?fileId=337d996a-WtWg-hDqs-oISj-sz95f0b8ac68

            The 2020 Democratic Primary demonstrates how gender biases can hurt female candidates and that some of the biases that might help women are not as prevalent in the United States. In the paragraphs above it has been demonstrated how gender biases have hurt the female candidate in 2020. The benefits of gender biases that Funk, Hinojosa, and Piscopo discovered do not help female candidates in the United States. These benefits do not help US candidates because the perceived levels of corruption in the Unites States are much lower than most of Latin America. According to the Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International only Uruguay and Chile rank close to the United States in perceived levels of corruption. Most countries in Latin America rank significantly lower than the United States. The advantages that that Funk, Hinojosa, and Piscopo are only an option when the country perceives high levels of corruption. In the United States female candidates face many negative biases created by gender biases, but do not receive any of the benefits because corruption is not seen as a major problem in the United States. For more female candidates to be nominated the public will have to demand that the parties make the changes, but before that can happen there will need to be major changes in gender biases.

https://www.transparency.org/cpi2019