Portrayal of Women Candidates in the Media

Transcript

I think for a long time there was a focus on what women were wearing, right. So always a little note about the color of her suit, to a degree were men also were not duplicated, there was never a mention of whether or not someone was wearing a Dior tie, or what color of their fabric of their suit was. So that tended to trivialize women because if you’re focusing on what she is wearing, you’re not focusing on what she is saying.

Secondly is that among the stereotypes is that women are aggressive but men are assertive. And if women behave too much like men they are seen as being hostile.

Another one that I think is a double-edged sword is the word ambition. You’d think that ambition is a valued neutral term. But it’s not. And ambition in the cases of men is often seen as a positive. Or it’s mixed, it can be either positive or negative. To call a woman ambitious is to almost always be negative and condemning. That harkens to what we see as I think a double standard. That if women are putting themselves and their ambitions first and foremost, they must be neglecting someone else or something else in their family. Arguably the same thing is true for men, but we don’t have the same social response to men being absentee fathers as we do for women being absentee mothers, or men being absentee sons to aging parents as we might for an adult daughter.