Great article. I constantly am frustrated by this "women are unelectable" belief that lives on without any real justification in the data. I do want to contest your conclusion though. You say:
"And we should point to 'the science,' which shows that women actually perform better than similar men in American elections, and that voters prefer women candidates over men by about two percentage points."
I think a better reading of the science you cite is that gender is mostly unimportant as an electoral factor, and that we would do a lot better to ignore it completely and evaluate electability based on other factors (previous electoral performance, ideology, polling data, etc.).
I guess I find the consistently of the survey results a little more compelling than you do! I think in practice it comes down to about the same thing, because two candidates will never be identical except for gender, and the other traits (policy positions, experience, public speaking ability) are likely to be much more impactful. But if you imagine that Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom are pretty similar on those fronts, I think the research would be a decent tiebreaker for Kamala. (Hopefully we can do better than either!)
I think we disagree a bit on how convincing we find these studies to be, but I think we agree on more than we disagree.
My stronger belief is that I don't remotely trust people to use demographic penalty data accurately or responsibly. I think they will fixate on "woman penalty" or "woman advantage" and not update this prior even in the face of strong evidence. I think this failure to update is common when people who stereotype based on demographics in other contexts, and it leads to much worse reasoning than if they had completely ignored the poly sci studies.
Per MiGru, infra., << Well argued, well written ! >>
But Lest We Forget :
{ D } continues to sink deeperandeeper into the sewer first dug by barry soetoro-soebarkah, or whatever his legal name really is, way back in '08 . . .
. . . to the point at which we have arrived,
chock-full of male and female { D } ' leaders ' and electeds --- at every level of governance, nationwide --- who are far-too-young, inexperienced, untutored, loose-cannon, policy-position whack-jobs . . .
A prime case-in-point, among MANY others too numerous to enumerate here and now, is Occasional Cortex : one must LOL at the mention of her name in conjunction with national office, so painfully embarrassing is that notion for so many obvious reasons . . .
Is it any wonder then that millions,
including Yornz TruLee, have abandoned { D },
the party of Father, GrandFather, Great-Grand-Father ---
both sides ---
and gone to { R } or Third Parties or { I }, or have dropped-out
?
Prof Dershowitz has gone to { R }, over Israel and Jewish issues writ-large
I have gone to { I }, where, I believe, The Future may lie,
as nearly half of the national registered electorate is { I }, or { R } or { D } { I }-leaning . . .
Thus I intone :
! POWER TO THE PURPLE !
Thank You for your time and attention to this {I}mportant message ________________________
Great piece, Eli. Thinking about 2028, why does it seem like the strongest potential female candidates (e.g. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger) are uninterested in running?
To add insult to injury, the one woman who shouldn't be running in 2028, Kamala Harris, seems intent on doing so.
Great article. I constantly am frustrated by this "women are unelectable" belief that lives on without any real justification in the data. I do want to contest your conclusion though. You say:
"And we should point to 'the science,' which shows that women actually perform better than similar men in American elections, and that voters prefer women candidates over men by about two percentage points."
I think a better reading of the science you cite is that gender is mostly unimportant as an electoral factor, and that we would do a lot better to ignore it completely and evaluate electability based on other factors (previous electoral performance, ideology, polling data, etc.).
I guess I find the consistently of the survey results a little more compelling than you do! I think in practice it comes down to about the same thing, because two candidates will never be identical except for gender, and the other traits (policy positions, experience, public speaking ability) are likely to be much more impactful. But if you imagine that Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom are pretty similar on those fronts, I think the research would be a decent tiebreaker for Kamala. (Hopefully we can do better than either!)
I think we disagree a bit on how convincing we find these studies to be, but I think we agree on more than we disagree.
My stronger belief is that I don't remotely trust people to use demographic penalty data accurately or responsibly. I think they will fixate on "woman penalty" or "woman advantage" and not update this prior even in the face of strong evidence. I think this failure to update is common when people who stereotype based on demographics in other contexts, and it leads to much worse reasoning than if they had completely ignored the poly sci studies.
Per MiGru, infra., << Well argued, well written ! >>
But Lest We Forget :
{ D } continues to sink deeperandeeper into the sewer first dug by barry soetoro-soebarkah, or whatever his legal name really is, way back in '08 . . .
. . . to the point at which we have arrived,
chock-full of male and female { D } ' leaders ' and electeds --- at every level of governance, nationwide --- who are far-too-young, inexperienced, untutored, loose-cannon, policy-position whack-jobs . . .
A prime case-in-point, among MANY others too numerous to enumerate here and now, is Occasional Cortex : one must LOL at the mention of her name in conjunction with national office, so painfully embarrassing is that notion for so many obvious reasons . . .
Is it any wonder then that millions,
including Yornz TruLee, have abandoned { D },
the party of Father, GrandFather, Great-Grand-Father ---
both sides ---
and gone to { R } or Third Parties or { I }, or have dropped-out
?
Prof Dershowitz has gone to { R }, over Israel and Jewish issues writ-large
I have gone to { I }, where, I believe, The Future may lie,
as nearly half of the national registered electorate is { I }, or { R } or { D } { I }-leaning . . .
Thus I intone :
! POWER TO THE PURPLE !
Thank You for your time and attention to this {I}mportant message ________________________
HCY, S.J.D.
Great piece, Eli. Thinking about 2028, why does it seem like the strongest potential female candidates (e.g. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger) are uninterested in running?
To add insult to injury, the one woman who shouldn't be running in 2028, Kamala Harris, seems intent on doing so.
Well argued, well written! AOC for Prez.