“What’s Her Job?” Agentic Women, Sexism, and the Consequences for Political Candidate Emergence

  • Phillip Chen, Melanee Thomas, Tania Gosselin, et al.

Abstract

Agentic women are frequently stereotyped negatively in politics. While public opinion suggests higher levels of egalitarian gender attitudes toward women in politics, these analyses miss important variations in explicit sexism. Using a survey experiment in the Canadian multi-party context, we show that for those reporting high levels of explicit sexism, agentic women are, as potential candidates, disadvantaged compared to similarly agentic men. Given the uneven distribution of sexist attitudes among partisans, these results suggest that gender representation differences between parties can be traced both to party recruitment strategies and the political behavior of party members.

Citation

Chen, Phillip, Melanee Thomas, Tania Gosselin, and Allison Harell. 2024. “‘What’s Her Job?’ Agentic Women, Sexism, and the Consequences for Political Candidate Emergence.” Journal of Women, Politics, & Policy 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2024.2359140

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