Do voters punish ambitious women? Tracking a gendered backlash toward the 2020 democratic presidential contenders

Political ambition is an advantage in men, but women striving for political power go against gendered social role prescriptions that place women in a subsidiary position of power. Conventional wisdom argues that women who breach prescribed social roles are thought to face a gendered backlash, but past research offers mixed conclusions on this point. We investigate whether women displaying progressive political ambition face a gendered backlash. We use a unique and original three-wave data collection that tracks voter responses to the candidates running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary over an 18-month period—a presidential race with a record-setting six women pursuing the presidential nomination. We find that ambitious women initially receive less positive ratings on warmth and likability relative to ambitious men, offering evidence of a gendered backlash. We also find that participants express less willingness to support an ambitious woman relative to an ambitious man. Our results also suggest that the initially negative ratings ambitious women receive stabilize during a campaign suggesting that women running for high levels of political office may be changing how voters think about women in power. While the women who ran for the presidency in 2020 were ultimately unsuccessful, their campaigns may normalize the idea of women in high-profile, high-power political positions.