Measuring Female Politician Stereotypes

Abstract:     
The goal of this paper is to assess current measures of female politician stereotypes related to traits. We assess the theory of stereotypes that female politician stereotypes overlap with woman stereotypes (e.g., warm, nice, empathetic as in Deaux & Lewis, 1984) and whether other traits, such as negative traits found to describe women leaders, such as quarrelsome, bitter, and cold (e.g., Eagly & Karau, 2002), should be part of our measures. We hypothesize that the stereotypes of female politicians will be more similar to stereotypes of women professionals than to those of women and, further, will include negative stereotypic traits associated with women leaders. Using a ground-up methodology to determine stereotype content first used by Katz and Braly (1933), we find that, indeed, trait stereotypes of female politicians are distinct from those of women. Yet, we find that female politicians seem to be defined more by the feminine and masculine traits that they lack than the traits that truly characterize them. We discuss implications for the future of research on politician gender.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 34

Keywords: gender stereotypes, female politicians, measurement

working papers series