“If candidates can win by effectively feminizing their opponents, what does it mean when a woman enters the race?” Two political scientists make sense of Trump’s win.
Ms. contributor Jackson Katz—creator of the 2024 documentary The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power, and the American Presidency—interviewed Dr. Caroline Heldman about the 2024 election.
Dr. Caroline Heldman is a political scientist and chair of the gender, women and sexuality studies program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is also president and CEO of Stand With Survivors and a political commentator for Spectrum News and CNN. Heldman earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and a certificate in executive leadership from the Harvard Business School. She has published eight books, including Women, Power, and Politics: The Fight for Gender Equality in the United States (Oxford University Press). Her work has been featured in numerous documentaries, including Miss Representation and The Mask You Live In. She co-founded the New Orleans Women’s Shelter, the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, End Rape on Campus (EROC) and Faculty Against Rape (FAR) and led the campaign that overturned the time limit on prosecuting rape in California. She is the board president of the TEP Center, the first civil rights museum in New Orleans, and the chair of the board of Alturas Institute, a nonprofit fighting for stronger democracy.
Below, Katz and Heldman—longtime friends and colleagues—discuss the presidential election, the “uphill climb” for women in politics, and how political parties can combat the gender penalty.
Jackson Katz: You’ve been studying gender and the presidency for a long time. Did anything surprise you in this year’s election?
Caroline Heldman: I continue to be surprised at how little campaigns, pollsters, pundits and mainstream political science consider gender in presidential elections, given that it always plays an outsized role in the U.S.
While other countries have put women in the top leadership position, mostly through familial replacement and elevation by their party in parliamentary systems, the unique electoral system in the U.S. has served as a barrier to a woman president. As you’ve written, the American presidency is always a contest of competing notions of manhood. The president is branded as the father-protector of the “free world,” so gender always plays a role, even when it’s all male candidates.
Presidential elections as manhood competitions is evidenced by the fact that male candidates weaponize femininity against their male opponents in order to win the office. “Little Marco Rubio.” Hand size discussions at a presidential debate. John Kerry criticized for wind surfing (not manly enough) and allegedly using Botox. Michael Dukakis not being “man enough” to fill the helmet. Al Gore throwing a football on a tarmac next to his campaign plane. Jeb Bush being criticized for his close relationship with his mother.
If candidates can win by effectively feminizing their opponents, what does it mean when a woman enters the race? Like any woman seeking a position of leadership that is default male, she starts at a considerable disadvantage.
A small group of political scientists have been studying the gender penalty for the presidency for half a century, but despite a deep engagement with theory, history and data, campaign operatives and pollsters have yet to quantitatively measure the presidential gender penalty. For campaign folks who seek to win elections, this oversight is baffling.
They’re ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t,’ and so far, no woman has figured out how to crack the code on this impossible standard.
Dr. Caroline Heldman
Katz: Women presidential candidates continue to have a real uphill climb. Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson described the “double-bind” dilemma facing women presidential candidates, the need to be “tough” enough to be commander in chief and yet traditionally “feminine” enough to be likeable.
Heldman: Yes. Because we define leadership in very masculine terms, uniquely so for the U.S. presidency, women candidates must be “properly masculine” to be seen as viable leaders, but the moment they project this, they’re penalized by many people for “violating” traditional norms of femininity. They’re “damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” and so far, no woman has figured out how to crack the code on this impossible standard.
Katz: Many people are convinced that Kamala Harris lost because she’s both a woman and a woman of color, and that her identity—even though she downplayed it—was simply a bridge too far for the American electorate. Others have argued that structural factors like the post-COVID spike in inflation and the price of food and other consumer products created insurmountable headwinds for incumbent candidates all over the world.
In your book Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Election, you wrote that Trump’s first presidential victory was driven less by economic factors than by racial resentment and sexism. What’s your take on those factors this time around?
Heldman: Many factors determine the outcome of presidential elections, and some are “fatal,” meaning they’re significant enough to cost the candidate the election. For example, perceptions of the economy were a “fatal factor” for Harris. To date, running as a woman has always been a “fatal factor.” It’s difficult to measure gender bias and the presidency because people are unlikely to admit that to pollsters. But a recent clever research study was able to get around this and discovered that 13 percent of Americans say they are “angry or upset” at the prospect of a woman in the White House.
For context, the largest winner/loser gap in recent decades is 7 percent. Despite having a gender penalty for women candidates that is twice that, party leaders continue to run women candidates without measuring and addressing this challenge.
In the 2024 race, Kamala Harris faced the intersectional bias of gender and race. When pollsters finally come up with a presidential gender penalty measure, it will have to account for the amplified challenge of running as a woman from a traditionally marginalized group(s).
Katz: In two of the last three elections, the Democrats nominated a woman, and they both lost to Donald Trump. Is it a sign of progress that one of the two major parties is finally nominating women for the highest position of political power? Or is the more important story that despite persistent polling data to the contrary, this country isn’t yet ready to elect a woman president?
Heldman: Since our founding, over 130 women have run for the presidency; 18 have made serious bids that garnered national support; two women have made it to the general election; and zero women have been elected president. Elizabeth Dole was the first female candidate to be taken seriously by the press, and even then, she received significantly more negative coverage, focus on her dress and appearance, and questioning of her viability as a candidate and as president.
Considering the fact that women presidential candidates have only been taken seriously for the last two decades, we’ve made tremendous progress in recent years. For example, six women ran in the 2020 Democratic primary (Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard), and while the race predictably narrowed to a white male, the presence of so many women on the debate stage had to shift some hearts and minds.
If we want a woman president, the nominating party needs to take the gender penalty seriously by quantifying and combating it.
Heldman
Another major sign of progress is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and Kamala Harris won 48.4 percent of the popular vote, so the possibility of electing a woman is within reach.
And for those who think Clinton’s 3 million popular vote advantage is evidence that there isn’t a gender penalty, I counter that Trump bested her within the rules of the game they were playing by focusing on swing states in the Electoral College. Had they been playing by the rules of a popular election, the final vote tally would have been far different, as Trump would not have sat idly by as votes piled up in solidly blue states. He would have pushed misogyny in more places and in more targeted ways to activate the gender penalty.
In short, if we want a woman president, the nominating party needs to take the gender penalty seriously by quantifying and combating it. Quantifying it is relatively easy with enough resources, but combating it is more complicated.
Katz: The gender politics of the 2024 election will be studied for decades. Among other things, the contest featured a feminist woman of color who was backed by a passionate multiracial coalition of women’s rights activists against a misogynous man who had equally strong support from the forces of right-wing anti-feminism. The voters were also strongly divided by gender, across many ethnic and racial groups—the so-called “boys vs. girls” election.
Can you offer any insights or predictions about the ways in which future historians and political scientists will identify the salience of gender issues in the 2024 campaign?
Heldman: The 2024 election will be remembered as the year young men swung to the right after a barrage of hypermasculine bravado and naked misogyny from Trump in non-traditional media.
Kamala Harris strategically downplayed her intersecting gender and racial identities, but Donald Trump made the 2024 election all about gender and race.
Black women face a unique form of intersectional bias called misogynoir. Trump and his team employed the racist Jezebel stereotype of Black women as sexually voracious on many occasions by suggesting she slept her way to the top. At his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump gave a hearty laugh to a member of the crowd who yelled, “she worked on a corner.” Mind you, the deplorable Jezebel trope was weaponized during American slavery to paint Black women as sexually aggressive and therefore “unrapable.” The Trump camp also routinely called Harris a “DEI hire,” “low-IQ” and “lazy,” tapping into racist and sexist notions of inferiority.
These disturbing messages were targeted to young men through unconventional media, like popular manosphere podcasts, and it worked. Trump won 56 percent of male voters ages 18–29. For context, 56 percent of young male voters supported Biden in 2020. According to post-election focus groups, Trump appealed to young men by appearing on ostensibly non-political podcasts of influencers they trust, and being likeable, despite making misogynistic and racist comments. In short, Trump used the freewheeling misogynistic culture of the manosphere to run the most openly sexist campaign we’ve ever seen, and it worked.
Kamala Harris strategically downplayed her intersecting gender and racial identities, but Donald Trump made the 2024 election all about gender and race.
Heldman
Katz: I’ve long believed that the question of whether the American electorate is ready for a woman president needs to be divided into two parts: Are they ready to elect a woman, and/or are they ready to elect a feminist woman, whose political project includes strengthening and advancing women’s rights and interests? It seems to me that electing a feminist woman is a much more threatening prospect.
What do you think about that? What does the research show? In light of the electoral defeats of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, do you think it’s more likely that the first woman elected president of the U.S. will be a Republican who opposes reproductive freedom and other fundamental women’s rights?
Heldman: Compared to Democratic women, the path to the presidency is harder for a Republican woman during the primary, but easier if she could make it to the general election. The 13 percent of Americans who are “angry or upset” at a woman president are concentrated on the Republican side, which makes it less likely they would nominate a woman to represent the GOP in the general election. But if she could make it past that hurdle, partisanship would mostly override sexism, and her electability would be great because she would pull from Independent and maybe even Democratic women who want to see a woman in the White House.
I think a moderate Republican woman with a military record has the best shot of getting to the Oval Office.
Katz: What kind of job do you think the political science field as a whole has done in studying and analyzing the gender and sexual politics of Trumpism, and right-wing populism in general? Political science has long been a very male-dominated academic discipline. Are there significant blind spots that you and other feminist political scientists routinely encounter from your male colleagues?
Heldman: Scholars who study gender and the presidency remain on the margins of political science, and the relevance of presidential studies has suffered because of it. When I co-authored the first quantitative analysis of media coverage of a woman presidential candidate—Elizabeth Dole—back in 2005, I naively thought that our robust findings would force wider consideration in the field, but these studies remain marginalized.
The subfield of presidential studies is stuck in time. The unspoken, unquestioned beliefs that dominate the discipline are woefully inadequate. A well-meaning, highly esteemed colleague I have presented research with for two decades contacted me after the election, confused about the outcome. When I brought up the gender penalty for the 547th time, it was like he was hearing it for the first time. There has been little to no recognition of the significant role gender plays in presidential elections—and the presidency more broadly—in mainstream political science.
Katz: What are some of the ways that people can channel their disappointment and despair about the outcome of this election into constructive action going forward, especially looking to the 2026 midterms?
Heldman: I’m hopeful that, if we recognize and quantify the gender penalty in presidential races, we can elect a woman president in our lifetime. The gender penalty affects Republican and Democratic women, especially affects women of color, and is baked into the way in which we conceive of the presidency. It’s not going away anytime soon, but the path forward is clear as day—data will show us who harbors gender biases pertaining to women’s leadership and the presidency, whether they are conscious of it or not. Once we have a baseline for bias, which of course will vary a bit each election, we can develop a plan to combat it.
Electing a woman president is a democratic priority. Our nation has been around for nearly 250 years, and we cannot call ourselves a strong democracy if we systematically exclude 51 percent of the population from holding the highest political office. We need to overcome and eventually eliminate the presidential gender penalty to become a more perfect union.
