Warren Succeeded Because Voters Saw Her as Caring. That’s Also Why She Failed

Last summer, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign was ascendant, comedian Ashley Nicole Black asked on Twitter whether Warren had a plan to fix Black’s love life. Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who for months had been pushing policy proposals for issues ranging from maternal mortality to green manufacturing, responded, “DM me and let’s figure this out.” (The subsequent phone call was reportedly very helpful.) When Warren’s main rival on the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), had a heart attack in the fall, she not only sent him kind get-well messages: She sent his staffers dinner and cookies while he was recovering in the hospital.

Such behavior inspired a social media meme about her detail-oriented consideration for others: “Elizabeth Warren always knows exactly what she wants when she gets to the front of the Starbucks line and never holds everyone else up.” “Elizabeth Warren has never asked a bartender ‘what whiskeys do you have?’ She’s already checked the shelf.” Warren became famous for making personal phone calls to small-dollar donors and for taking selfies with voters: As of January, she had taken 100,000 of them.

The perception of Warren as exceptionally considerate and competent helped her to lead the polls by October. That perception also helps to explain her subsequent downfall.

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In an illuminating series of studies, social psychologist Madeline Heilman and her colleagues found that, when a man and a woman competed for a traditionally male position of authority, there was a marked bias against the female candidate in favor of the male candidate. When information about their competence was equivocal, 86 percent of participants deemed the male candidate more competent. When there was strong evidence of both candidates’ competence, 83 percent of people judged the man more likable. The female candidate was regarded, moreover, as “interpersonally hostile” — as conniving, pushy, selfish, abrasive, manipulative and untrustworthy — even though the study participants had the same information, on average, about the two people to be evaluated (the male and female names on the personnel files were switched for every second participant). These biases were demonstrated in women as much as men, and in people who were young, as millennials.

But the researchers also found that this potent gender bias could be overcome under specific conditions: when the woman was described as having communal attributes — being understanding, caring, sensitive to others’ needs and so on. For men, such communal virtues made no difference to their popularity. So women needed to be extraordinary just for their power to be palatable. When they were seen as erring in these respects, they were liable to be punished and rejected. And research shows that while voters are often willing to vote for male candidates they dislike if they perceive them as qualified, this is not true for female ones.

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