A Feminine Advantage? Delineating the Effects of Feminine Trait and Feminine Issue Messages on Evaluations of Female Candidates

Current scholarship offers conflicting conclusions about whether female candidates have a feminine advantage or a disadvantage. Previous work does not consider whether voters respond similarly to all types of messages that might emphasize feminine stereotypes, such as feminine trait and feminine issue messages. I argue that voters will respond differently to trait-based feminine messages relative to issue-based feminine messages. I test the effects of trait-based and issue-based feminine messages through two survey experiments. The results consistently show that emphasizing feminine traits harms female candidates, whereas emphasizing feminine issues helps female candidates. I use role congruity theory to argue that feminine traits activate feminine stereotypes about women, and feminine issues do not activate these stereotypes. I also show that trait-based and issue-based feminine messages affect Democratic and Republican female candidates in very different ways. These results have implications for the ability of women to win elected office and reverse the pervasive underrepresentation of women in politics.

Balancing Gender and Power: How Disney’s Hercules Fails to Go the Distance

Disney’s Hercules (1997) includes multiple examples of gender tropes throughout the film that provide a hodgepodge of portrayals of traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Hercules’ phenomenal strength and idealized masculine body, coupled with his decision to relinquish power at the end of the film, may have resulted in a character lacking resonance because of a hybridization of stereotypically male and female traits. The film pivots from hypermasculinity to a noncohesive male identity that valorizes the traditionally-feminine trait of selflessness. This incongruous mixture of traits that comprise masculinity and femininity conflicts with stereotypical gender traits that characterize most Disney princes and princesses. As a result of the mixed messages pertaining to gender, Hercules does not appear to have spurred more progressive portrayals of masculinity in subsequent Disney movies, showing the complexity underlying gender stereotypes.

Self‐gender schemata and the processing of social information

Previous research has found that subjects possessing a self‐gender schema in line with gender stereotypes (i.e. sex‐typed individuals) are quicker than non‐sex‐typed subjects in deciding whether a stereotypically masculine or feminine trait adjective is self‐descriptive or not. The results of memory tasks are more contradictory. In this study we have supposed that gender‐schematic subjects can most effectively process gender‐linked information even if it does not relate to the self. More specifically, we hypothesized (a) that sex‐typed subjects are quicker than non‐sex‐typed subjects in deciding whether a trait adjective can be better attributed to men or women and (b) that they recall a greater number of masculine and feminine adjectives and have greater gender‐based clustering indices compared with non‐sex‐typed individuals. Subjects previously identified as Sex‐typed, Androgynous, Indifferentiated, and Cross‐sex‐typed were presented with adjectives referring to stereotypic masculine and feminine traits. The results showed that sex‐typed subjects, regardless of their sex, were faster than the other groups in deciding whether a certain trait applied more to a man than to a woman. No significant differences between the groups of subjects were found as to the number of masculine and feminine items being correctly recalled or to gender‐based clustering indices.