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

How does sexism affect women’s pathway to political office? Scholars have claimed that voter sexism is over because women candidates win elections at the same rate as men.

However, the emergence of a gender equality backlash, misogynistic social media campaigns and the continued under-representation of women in political office globally, indicate a need to re-examine whether sexism acts as a barrier to women’s representation.

To better understand political representation, therefore, it is important to understand how and under which conditions sexism by voters, media and political parties, actual and anticipated, can lead women candidates to alter campaign behavior and strategies.

For the proposed programme of research in TWICEASGOOD, we reconceptualize the “gender penalty” faced by women candidates to take into account the sexism, threats of violence that they face online, through social media, in the traditional media and in face-to-face encounters.

We aim to understand the extent of these types of sexism as well as the ways in which women candidates anticipate and counter them, by being “twice as good”, in order to achieve electoral success.

To better understand how encounters of “everyday sexism” on the campaign trail, both online and offline and in the media, shape women’s campaign efforts and chances at electoral success, we propose an ambitious five-year programme of research that captures candidate experiences of sexism and assesses their impact on electoral outcomes.

To capture how sexism is experienced “everyday” on the campaign trail, we used 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 sexism index.

This rich data will generate new insights about the causes of women’s continued under-representation in politics.