Harris Wiped the Floor with Trump. That’s Actually a Problem (Plus, an Announcement)
When women show their competence, we do not tend to be rewarded. Rather, we are punished and perceived as nasty bitches.
It was a spectacle. It was a farce. It was a thrilling contrast. Vice President Kamala Harris began seeming nervous, but quickly rose to the challenge during last night’s debate. Her strategy was clear: bait Trump and make him seem like the very small man he is. She taunted him over his rallies (calling them “boring” and “exhausting”) resulting in the most unhinged and petulant performance from Trump in some months. “In Springfield [Ohio], they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Parroting this gross, racist trope about Haitian migrants made Trump seem fully the silly meme of a human being he is. And who could forget his assertion that Harris would usher in a new era of “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” It’s a mad lib, a word salad—while Harris remained cool, collected, and humorous. She narrowed her eyes at him on stage, telegraphing the thought: “This man is not well. He needs help—not a platform, let alone a seat at the Oval Office and the nuclear codes that accompany it.”
It was, in many ways, a delight to watch Harris win the debate so decisively. (“I have a concept of a plan,” Trump ended up whining, limply.) Unfortunately, however, Harris is likely to be punished by many people for her display of competence. Already she has been called “insufferable,” her voice likened to “fingernails running uninterrupted down a blackboard.” Her faces were “off-putting.” Yes, Harris outperformed Trump, admitted conservative commentator Tim Stanley. But “punching down [at Trump] was almost all the lady did,” he added. It’s not true, but what’s more interesting and telling is the framing. When women make men look bad, we are widely perceived as aggressors, thanks to the workings of misogyny. And when a man is made to look bad by a woman, due to his own incompetence and hubris, he will reliably attract sympathy—or himpathy, as I call it.
In a revealing study by Madeline Heilman and her collaborators, entitled “Penalties for Success: Reactions to Women Who Succeed at Male Gender-Typed Tasks,” participants assessed two high-flying performers in a traditionally male-coded job, as an Assistant Vice President for sales at an aircraft company. One was male—James; one was female—Andrea. Each was described in the relevant condition as a “stellar performer,” according to their annual performance review, with sales in the top 5% of all employees at their level. The descriptions of the two employees was otherwise equivalent (which the researchers safeguarded even further by alternating the names “James” and “Andrea” on their information packets).
The results? Although participants rated the two candidates as equally competent, they liked Andrea significantly less than James in this condition. They “overwhelmingly demonstrated a preference for the male rather than the female employee,” stereotyping her as significantly more interpersonally hostile—a measure that encompassed being abrasive, conniving, manipulative, untrustworthy, selfish, and pushy. “[What happens] with clear indications of success is dramatic—women who are acknowledged as successful are viewed not merely as indifferent to others but downright uncivil,” wrote the researchers.
This research is important for our current political moment. It suggests that women who compete with, and threaten, men in traditionally masculine-coded roles—and the presidency could hardly be more so—won’t be reliably rewarded for their competence. Rather, they will often be punished and disliked on that basis. (Notably, these results held just as much for female as male participants—who were college students at the time, and are now around 40, elder millennials.) For women, it’s not enough to do it backwards and in high heels, à la Ginger Rogers. You also have to do it with a smile on your face, reassuring everyone you’re unthreatening and convivial. You have to be supremely competent; and you have to somehow temper the perception that you’re a bitch in being so. (And, if anything, one would expect that a woman’s showing up a worse and less competent male candidate, much beloved by a large segment of the population, would only exacerbate these tendencies—although this is admittedly speculative on my part. The same goes for my sense that these dynamics are likely only exacerbated for women of color like Harris.)
So do women who win on men’s turf inevitably lose? No. Fascinatingly, and tellingly, the researchers found in a follow-up study that the sense of competent women as abrasive and hostile could be tempered by including explicit information that she was exceptionally communal—caring, nurturing, warm, and so on. I suspect that Harris was trying, perhaps even deliberately, to cultivate such a perception when she emphasized her middle-class roots and fierce advocacy for the American people. She did it the most successfully when she recorded her—to my mind, clearly genuine—dismay about the situation that has befallen women and other pregnant people in the wake of the Dobbs decision. “You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot?” Harris asked, rhetorically. She spoke poignantly of those who prayed for a baby now being denied the reproductive care they need to avoid going septic—or even losing their lives. She spoke of those who now have to get on a plane to cross state lines to get an abortion—an expensive, humiliating non-solution that would likely be criminalized under a Trump presidency. She spoke of the obvious fact that forcing a twelve year-old girl who falls pregnant due to rape or incest to bear the pregnancy to term is deeply immoral. In truth, it always is.
One other established path to showing communality is not open to Harris: speaking as a mother. For, Heilman and her team also showed that “information that the successful female manager was a mother, which created perceptions of her as a communal person, eliminated the negativity directed toward her… [for being] successful at traditionally male jobs.” (The reality that Harris is a mother within her blended family, to her two step-children, would not be sufficient for far too many people, fixated as we are culturally on biological parenthood.)
Of course, if Harris had not performed as brilliantly, or bested Trump as successfully as she did, it would be completely disastrous: Heilman et. al. showed in the first of the studies above that, when evidence of success was equivocal for both James and Andrea, over eighty per cent of people (86%) deemed him more competent. When their performance was both undeniably stellar, over eighty per cent of people (83%) deemed him more likable. And again, these participants were not old, as millennials, and the results were no different for men versus women. Most people were hence committed—presumably unconsciously—to finding a basis for preferring a man to an identically described woman (remember the two names, “James” and “Andrea” were simply being alternated for every second participant on the personnel files.)
So women in masculine-coded domains like politics face a genuine double bind: don’t shine and be deemed a dullard; shine, and be presumed an ice queen until proven otherwise.
There is no way out but through: be on the lookout for gender bias in the wake of the debate, and in general. Call people out on their shit. Do not let it fester and proliferate and become a thing on social media. If Harris is labelled too shrill, too mean, too condescending, or too abrasive, name it for what it is: misogyny of the kind that loses crucial elections.
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Thank you for walking through those studies. It's more reminders of how backwards and inverted this world is (and that sadly women are vulnerable to this bias against other women too).
I do think Kamala Harris, so far, has been really, really good at this.
"For women, it’s not enough to do it backwards and in high heels, à la Ginger Rogers. You also have to do it with a smile on your face, reassuring everyone you’re unthreatening and convivial. You have to be supremely competent; and you have to somehow temper the perception that you’re a bitch in being so."
The first woman president will definitely have to do all of that, and she seems acutely aware of it (and perhaps her experiences specifically as a woman of color have helped prepare her for it). If she manages to win, hopefully that monumental event will, over time, help soften the glass ceiling some for the women who follow her.
The one thing that worries me is the race seems to keep defaulting to voters are upset about the economy, and remain stubbornly convinced that Trump is "better" on it. If it weren't for that I'd be really confident in her chances. Ironically, when Hillary lost in 2016, pundits talked about 'economic anxiety' when it was really just misogyny and racism. This time, if Kamala loses, it might be attributed to misogyny and racism when it actually IS economic anxiety. The universe can be cruel.
Kate, thank you for writing about women having to pay - with abuse - for their successes. As always, I appreciate your essay about this subject which was clear, direct, on-point, and candid. Time after time you energize me by writing on meaningful subjects that I have not considered, recently or ever. You remain my North Star!