Of New Jersey’s 120 legislators, only 35 are women. The small slice of the pie that the majority of the population controls has as much to do with campaign strategists, media consultants and pollsters as it does with voters — and possibly more. NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams spoke with Kelly Dittmar, scholar for the Center for American Women and Politics, who has conducted surveys and published a book about navigating gender in political campaigns.
In 2008 when Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, Dittmar was an observer and scholar watching the campaign with an eye toward gender.
“I watched that campaign and really felt like there was a sort of lack of understanding of gender amongst her campaign, and particularly amongst her top campaign staff,” said Dittmar. “It came out after the election that one of her top strategists had sort of written a memo about the fact that she couldn’t be the first mother president, she had to be the first father president that’s a woman. So whatever you take that to mean, it said to me at least that there was some sort of lack of understanding of how gender might play in the campaign.”
Dittmar says that spurred her to look further into how gender influences campaign strategy and how ultimately the role of campaign professionals — consultants, strategists and campaign managers — deciding how candidates navigate gender.
“What we saw at the end of the day was that [Clinton] never really used gender in a way that could work to her advantage and that was frustrating to me and of interest to me,” she said.
When asked about the difference in how women navigate gender roles when they’re running for office in contrast to their male counterparts, Dittmar says that voters hold women to different expectations — specifically expectations of gender roles, traits and issue expertise that we associate more often with men or more often with women.
“The things that we look for in candidates and office holders unfortunately still align more generally with what we expect of men, and masculinity,” Dittmar says. “For women they have to figure out ways to not only prove that they’re womanly enough, but also prove that they’re a qualified, credentialed candidate for office whereas for men those two things tend to coincide much more easily.”
Dittmar surveyed strategists on whether they think about gender when putting together campaigns.
“When I surveyed strategists, one of their first things is to say, ‘Well, not really. We don’t pay that much attention to it.’ But then when you probe a little bit deeper, they do in fact consider the ways in which gender might inform voter perceptions, how voters think and see a candidate and also how they go about interacting with the other candidates,” she said.
An example of this can be seen in male candidates who are running against a female candidate. Males might be more likely to think twice about the ways in which they go negative against a woman — especially in a debate, interpersonal setting or any way in which their gender might inform voter’s evaluation about them.
“They don’t want to appear like a bully and instead they want to seem like gentlemen,” she says.
In Dittmar’s book, Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns, she makes the case that there are gender rules. When asked about whether a woman’s electoral success has to be an adaption to rather than triumph over gender barriers, she says that women may adapt in order to win the votes and deter any doubts about whether they meet expectations of what it means to be a candidate. She uses Hillary Clinton in 2008 as an example of this.
“Hillary Clinton had to prove she was tough enough for the job, so you heard her talk about being tough, being ready to lead, being strong — traits that aren’t always associated as easily with women. We’ve seen this in surveys. And so you adapt to the roles by overcompensating, right? By demonstrating all of these ways in which you’re strong and tough and a leader instead of challenging them,” Dittmar says.
In her book, she lists compassion and cooperation as traits that people don’t often associate with a candidate or office holder, challenging readers to think differently about those traits.
“We know that in Washington right now those things might be a good thing,” she says.
When asked about the impact of gender in relation to the 2013 governor’s debate between Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Barbara Buono, Dittmar says she can’t imagine somebody with Christie’s “bully” persona not being particularly careful about the ways in which he interacted with Buono.
“I would imagine that his strategists, knowing full-well that this is an issue that male candidates sometimes deal with in running against women, would have advised him to be particularly careful just about the tone in which he interacted with Sen. Buono and the ways in which he approached her or attacked her in some ways or critiqued her in the campaign,” she says. “He may have had to think twice about that in particular because she was a woman candidate.”