Associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton has a cognitive explanation for why we may view Clinton’s ambition as ‘pathological’.15 She ‘was forging into a territory that is overwhelmingly associated in people’s minds with men’. As a result, he explains, voters experienced her candidacy as a norm violation. And norm violations are, Mendoza-Denton writes, ‘quite simply, aversive, and are often associated with strong negative emotion’.
There’s a very simple reason that a powerful woman is experienced as a norm violation: it’s because of the gender data gap. I personally grew up heavily buying into the myth that women are just . . . a bit rubbish. Yes, this was partly because that’s how women are represented in the media (consumerist, trivial, irrational) but it’s also because women are so under-represented. I was one of those girls being taught, via a curriculum, a news media and a popular culture that were almost entirely devoid of women, that brilliance didn’t belong to me. I wasn’t being shown women I could look up to (either past or present). I wasn’t being taught about female politicians, female activists, female writers, artists, lawyers, CEOs. All the people I was taught to admire were men, and so in my head power, influence, and ambition equated with maleness. And, if I’m being really honest, I think I experienced this norm violation as well. I was all too ready to accept the idea that female bosses were just too ambitious – which as we all know is code for bitch.
The unpalatable truth is that it is still considered unladylike for a woman to want to be president. A 2010 study found that both male and female politicians are seen as power-seeking, but that this is only a problem for female politicians.16 In a similar vein, Mendoza-Denton conducted a study which found that context determines how ‘assertive’ men and women are judged to be.17 In a stereotypically ‘male’ context (car mechanic, Wall street, president of the United States) a woman is judged to behave more assertively than a man saying exactly the same as her. And while it was OK if a bit odd for men to be assertive in a ‘female’ context (choosing curtains, planning a child’s birthday party), it was definitely not OK for a woman to be assertive in any context. Assertive women are bossy.
The social downer on women being seen to seek professional power is partly because social power (being seen as warm and caring) is women’s ‘consolation prize for renouncing competition with men,’ write psychology professors Susan Fiske and Mina Cikara.18 Social power for women is therefore intrinsically incompatible with professional power: if a woman wants to be seen as competent she has to give up being seen as warm.
But so what. So you’re disliked. So you’re seen as cold. Suck it up. If you don’t like the heat, get back to the kitchen, right?
Wrong. That would be to assume that men face the same heat for being seen as cold. They don’t. The 2010 study didn’t just find that female politicians were see as less caring. It found that this perception inspired moral outrage in both male and female study participants, who viewed such women with contempt, anger and/or disgust. This was not the case for their male counterparts. Molly Crockett, associate professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, has an explanation for this disparity: being seen as uncaring is a norm violation for women in a way that it just isn’t for men. ‘There is an expectation’, she tells me, ‘that on average women are going to be more pro-social than men.’ Any deviation by a woman from what is seen (no matter how illogically) as a ‘moral’ stance therefore shocks us more.
Given the clear significance of gender when it comes to these issues, you would hope that this might be an area of research that bucks the gender-data-gap trend. It does not. Imagine my excitement when I came across a paper published in January 2017 entitled ‘Faced with exclusion: Perceived facial warmth and competence influence moral judgments of social exclusion’.19 Given the findings of Fiske and Cikara about women’s warmth/competence trade-off this should have been an extremely useful paper. As the authors explain, ‘people’s moral judgment about social exclusion can be influenced by facial appearance, which has many implications in intergroup research’. That is, people’s decisions about whether or not it’s fair that someone is being ostracised or bullied can be influenced by what the victim looks like.
Indeed. Unfortunately, the study authors ‘used male faces only for reasons of test efficiency’, making the study absolutely worthless when it comes to the group most affected by this issue, i.e. women. Fiske and Cikara explain that gender, ‘is a salient, and perhaps the most salient, social category’, with gender stereotyping often being immediate and unconscious: ‘the mere sight of a woman can immediately elicit a specific set of associated traits and attributions, depending on the context’. Still, at least the test was efficient.
‘It’s actually kind of shocking how little attention there’s been to gender in the morality literature,’ says Crockett. But on the other hand, maybe it’s not: the study of morality, Crockett tells me, is ‘really aiming at trying to uncover human universals’. At the point she mentions ‘universals’, of course, male-default-thinking alarm bells start ringing in my head. Many academics in the field of morality subscribe to ‘very egalitarian, utilitarian, impartial views of what is right’, Crockett continues, and they perhaps impose those norms ‘onto the research that we do’. The alarm bells ring off the hook.
But the next thing she says provides something of an explanation for how male-default thinking could be so prevalent in a world that is, after all, 50% female. ‘It’s just a feature of human psychology,’ she explains, to assume that our own experiences
