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Ambitious Women: Gender and Voter Perceptions of Candidate Ambition

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When men are ambitious, it’s just taken for granted. Well of course they should be ambitious. When women are ambitious, why?

—Barack Obama

(Interview with Samantha Bee, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, 31 October 2016).

Abstract

Are ambitious women punished in politics? Building on literature from negotiation, we argue that women candidates who are perceived to be ambitious are more likely to face social backlash. We first explore what the term ‘ambitious’ means to voters, developing and testing a new multidimensional concept of perceived ambition, from desire to run for higher office to scope of agenda. We then test the link between these ‘ambitious’ traits and voter support for candidates using five conjoint experiments in two countries, the U.S. and the U.K. Our results show that while ambitious women are not penalized overall, the aggregate results hide differences in taste for ambitious women across parties. We find that in the U.S. left-wing voters are more likely to support women with progressive ambition than right-wing voters (difference of 7% points), while in the U.K. parties are not as divided. Our results suggest that ambitious women candidates in the U.S. face bias particularly in the context of non-partisan races (like primaries and local elections), when voters cannot rely on party labels to make decisions.

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Notes

  1. Shear (2016).

  2. McCormack (2008).

  3. Roberts (2018).

  4. Denvir (2018).

  5. Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria. @Ocasio2018. Tweet. 30 June 2018, 9:08 AM.

  6. Amann and Becker (2017).

  7. Mascaro (2017).

  8. Replication materials are available in the Political Behavior Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KVTPVX.

  9. Least Ambitious results available from author. We can only look at four attribute combinations at a time in the FindIt package for R; however, additional analysis where we substitute Parental and Experience-based Ambition for other traits confirms the findings presented here.

  10. We note that the agenda-based trait “Complete overhaul” of the political agenda is also associated with a significant and positive bump, but it is smaller at 0.75.

  11. For DLABSS 1, marginal means for Democrats and Republicans for women with progressive ambition are 0.56 and 0.42 (\(\hbox{p} < 0.001\)), and for DLABBS 2, 0.54 and 0.46 (\(\hbox{p} = 0.02\)).

  12. See Replication Files.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Loes Aaldering, Peter Allen, Renata Bongiorno, Whitney Ross Manzo, Shom Mazumder, Eileen McDonagh, Jennifer Piscopo, Shauna Shames, four anonymous reviewers, and participants at APSA, EPSA, the Exeter SEORG seminar, the Harvard Gender & Politics workshop, and the Harvard American Politics Research Workshop for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. We acknowledge funding for the Harvard Digital Lab for the Social Sciences from The Pershing Square Venture Fund for Research on the Foundations of Human Behavior. We also thank the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics and APSA for small grants that made this research possible.

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  1. Sparsha Saha and Ana Catalano Weeks contributed equally to this work.

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  1. Harvard College Writing Program, Harvard University, One Bow Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Sparsha Saha

  2. Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

    Ana Catalano Weeks

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Saha, S., Weeks, A.C. Ambitious Women: Gender and Voter Perceptions of Candidate Ambition. Polit Behav 44, 779–805 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09636-z

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