Twice as Hard, Half as Good? Women Candidates’ Experience of Sexism on the Campaign Trail

Project Information

TWICEASGOOD

Grant agreement ID: 101019284

DOI

10.3030/101019284

EC signature date 24 September 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 998,00

EU contribution

€ 2 499 998,00

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TWICEASGOOD (Twice as Hard, Half as Good? Women Candidates’ Experience of Sexism on the Campaign Trail)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

What are women’s pathways to political office? And what are the barriers they face along the way that can explain the continued lack of women’s representation in elected office?How can we explain that women, when they stand for office, are about as likely to win as men? To answer these questions, we reconsider the “gender penalty”faced by women candidates to take into account their everyday experiences on the campaign trail. We ask whether women are working “twice as hard” to achieve similar levels of electoral success. To answer this question, we investigated the ways in which women candidates anticipate and counter everyday experiences by working “twice as hard” or being “twice as good”. We also develop innovative survey instruments and experiments to test a ”gender penalty” -- voter bias against women candidates.

To better understand how these everyday encounters on the campaign trail, both online and offline and in the media, shape women’s campaign efforts and chances at electoral success, we have captured candidate experiences, voter responses and assessed their impact on electoral outcomes. We employ a mixed-methods approach, bringing together participant-observation of candidates on the campaign trail in four countries with quantitative media analysis, candidate surveys and a battery of items administered in Round 11 of the European Social Survey to create a cross-national gender attitudes index. This rich data will generates new insights into the causes of women’s continued under-representation in politics.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have conducted election studies in our fou case study countries (UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Türkiye) comprised of campaign ethnographies, candidate surveys, voter and media studies and have begun to write-up our analysis. In the analysis, the TWICEASGOOD research team has integrated different methods and modes of analysis including qualitative ethnographic participant observation, surveys of electors and candidates, automated text analysis and survey experiments to examine women’s pathways to political office. We have innovated using comparative ethnographic research in election campaigns and applying computational models to understand sexism across structured and unstructured data. For the campaign ethnographies, we have recruited 50 women candidates from 4 countries and from political parties across the ideological spectrum. We have conducted 200 researcher days of participant observation in four national and two local/provincial elections. In our participant observation with candidates on the campaign trail, we undertook a number of observational activities: attending public meetings and hustings, shadowing candidates as they canvassed and delivered campaign materials to residents; observing candidates’ interactions with members of the public in the street and on the doorstep, as well as their interactions with colleagues, volunteers and staff from their respective political parties. We combined these activities with semi-structured interviews with the candidates (often more than one per candidate), as well as more informal, ethnographic interviews with their team members, local MPs, and journalists covering events.

These unique data are complemented by data from 860 candidates who responded to our online survey (this will increase once we have the data from the UK survey). We have also collected data from 8500 respondents in 4 post-election survey capturing gender attitudes among the public. We also draw on the Gender Attitudes module of the newly released European Social Survey Round 11 to measure the relationship between sexism and candidate preferences. Our rich data allow us to capture the complexities of individuals’ experiences, the unspoken ways candidates navigate their experiences with the public, their party, and the media and the often deeply felt emotion and feelings entwined with experiencing sexism. Our candidate surveys allow us to compare experiences between men and women on a larger scale and examine the hypotheses generated from our fieldwork. Our post-election surveys and media analysis allow us to explore their responses to women candidates showing that similar campaign efforts do not translate into the same electoral returns for women as for men.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our campaign observations have led to new insights about experiences of sexism and violence in campaigns. Our initial hypothesis was that women need to work “twice as hard” or be “twice as good” in campaigns to achieve gender equal outcomes. However, this “twice as good” narrative also emerged spontaneously during fieldwork, used by candidates and party actors as a stereotype about women as political candidates. We understand the ways in which this narrative and its stereotypes need to be constantly managed as women act to counter it or perform it to prove their suitability for politics. In this way, it creates additional labour for women candidates.

Most of our participants reported experiences of everyday sexism and other described experiences of harassment and abuse. However, understanding and articulating these experiences varies. Some women deny that sexism is a root cause of these experiences while others see them as deeply embedded within masculine political spaces and practices. Furthermore, women attribute the cause of voter hostility during campaigns to polarisation in the electorate and a culture of anti-politics. Our research has also uncovered to nuanced ways in which political parties can act to exacerbate everyday experiences through lack of support, active denial (“grow a thicker skin”). Some women were reluctant to bring complaints of sexism and harassment to political parties because they feared backlash, assumed no action would be taken or were concerned about potential to their political careers.

Our examination of voter bias and the gender penalty presents a complex picture of how voters respond to women as political candidates. Our analysis of large-scale survey data finds that members of the electorate want to increase women’s representation and feel political parties should be responsible for selecting more women candidates. However, we also find that women candidates are not as successful in elections at translating their campaign efforts into votes. For example, women can put more effort into social media during a campaign, but this effort may receive less media attention, and the media coverage received is less effective in generating electoral success than for men. Our experimental research shows that voters who hold sexist attitudes are less likely to punish candidates for sexual misconduct.

We continue to work on the following research questions by leveraging our rich comparative data: What are the causes and consequences of sexists and misogynistic attitudes for political choices and does this vary across cultural contexts? How do electoral institutions shape the personalization of politics and its impact on women’s campaign activities? What are the factors leading to sexist and abusive treatment of candidates? And what are the consequences for women’s political ambition? What is the evidence for a “gender penalty” across cultural and institutional contexts? What is the role of the media in the “gender penalty”? Additionally, we aim to address the emotional responses to sexism and harassment and the impact on the mental health of candidates, a blind spot in the current research.

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