Perceived Competency Based on Gender

What were we interested in?

    Since at least the 1970's, gender studies as a subfield of Political Science has been on the rise. Women's representation in government worldwide remains for the most part disproportionate to that of men, constituting an issue that deserves attention. There are many explanations for why this is: women are recruited less, they show less political ambition, they show higher aversion to competitive environments, etc. The explanation we were interested in researching is called the "double bind," which is what it is called when women cannot be simultaneously perceived as both feminine and competent. Due to our interest in this, the research for our study focused on how gender impacts public perception of competence. In addition, because there is extensive literature on the differing preferences of political parties in issue stances and when choosing candidates, we wanted to consider this as a factor as well. These overlapping interests resulted in our research question: how does a politician's gender influence the electorate's perception of their competency, and how does this differ across the two major U.S. parties? We hypothesized that due to more intense scrutiny of female candidates by the Republican party, there would be a statistically significant difference between how parties rated competency based on gender, with Democratic voters giving female politicians higher scores. 

What was our research design?

    To answer this question, our research partnership decided to conduct a survey experiment. This survey consisted of a fictional speech made by a politician we states was a state senator, as well as questions relating to the senator's competence. These questions included, "On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the competency of this senator?" "How likely would you be to vote for this senator in an election?" and finally "After reading this speech, would you be confident in your community's ability to rebuild?" In addition to these competency-related questions, we included basic demographic questions which asked for information such as race, age, education level, gender, etc. Our survey randomly assigned participants to one of three groups: a control gender-neutral group, a female senator treatment group, and a male senator treatment group. In other words, the only factor that differed across all groups was whether they were told the gender of their politician, and if so, what that gender was. 

    This survey was distributed primarily online through the social media platform known as "Reddit." While we acknowledge that using a generally center-left and young-skewing platform may be a possible limitation to our research, we believe our results are still general, and we sought a number of different forums which ranged all over the ideological scale to distribute our survey. Thanks to an overwhelming response and a final n of 4,762, we were able to effectively analyze our results. 

What were our results?

    We analyzed the data using regression analysis. Our results showed that party was not a significant factor in perceiving competence based on gender. Republican respondents from both the male and female groups gave an average competency score of 7.36. Democrats in the male group gave an average competency score 7.46 while Democrats in the female group gave an average competency score of 7.36. However, this difference was not statistically significant. In addition to competency, party also had little to no effect on how respondents rated confidence in the ability to rebuild. Adversely, there was an overall trend of respondents being more willing to vote for politicians in the male senator group, but thus difference was not statistically significant. 

    In light of these results, my partner and I think that our gender signaling may have been too subtle. Previous research indicates that gender should have been a contributing factor in competency perception, and the lack of any significance concerning gender in our results leads us to believe the survey could have emphasized it more. 

    Although party did not turn out to be a significant factor as we had predicted, there were four variables that did yield significant results in attributing the perceived competence of a senator. Certain groups in the race, education level, age, and gender variables proved to provide significant results regardless of gender of the senator. For race, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous respondents gave the senators significantly lower competency scores, as did respondents ages 25-34 in the age variable. This was when compared to White respondents and respondents aged 35-44. For education level, those with a high school degree or more gave senators significantly higher competence scores, as did females. This was when compared to those with a high school degree or less and males. Although our research did not prove significant along the lines of the senator's gender or political party, these existing significant results provide ground for further study perhaps in analyzing which groups have less trust in government and why.