Vice President Kamala Harris not only has a very real chance to make history, but she also has a shot at defying science.
The last few days have been a whirlwind for the Harris campaign—a campaign that technically only launched on Sunday and has already amassed more than $100 million in donations and secured the all-important endorsement of Charli XCX, which catapulted her into the pop-culture stratosphere. However, alongside that endorsement—and many others including from former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama—Harris switched over her campaign X (formally Twitter) account to the handle “KamalaHQ.” According to research, it’s a move that could make or break her campaign.
“I kept seeing men referred to by just their last name, and equally famous, well-known, eminent women, not identified the same way,” Dr. Stav Atir, an assistant professor studying behavioral science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Glamour about what inspired her research, “How gender determines the way we speak about professionals,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “I saw it in academia. We would have lab meetings and casually talk about women and men differently. And watching panel shows on TV and politics, I’d notice the same thing.”
That “same thing” was that women, even those running for the highest office in the United States, are more often referred to by their first name alone, while men are more often referred to by their last. And that, Atir and her co-author Dr. Melissa Ferguson reported, is a form of gender bias that can have serious consequences when it comes to how people are perceived.
Think about it this way: You call her Jane Austin. You call him Dickens. You call her Hillary. You call him Clinton. You call him Trump and her Kamala.
To come to these conclusions, Atir and Ferguson collected transcripts from shows like All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Morning Edition, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and The Sean Hannity Show, coding 9,572 references from 336 segments. After crunching the numbers, they found that “speakers were more than twice as likely (126.42%) to use a surname when speaking about a man than when speaking about a woman.”
They ran eight different studies in total. Across the studies, the results suggested that this gender bias may be seriously consequential.
“Participants judged fictional researchers referred to by surname as better known and more eminent in their field than researchers referred to by full name,” the study stated. “Evidence suggests that this inference of fame and eminence, in turn, led to increased judgments of status, likelihood of winning an award, and deservingness of career award[s] and associated funding.”
Their study isn’t the only one showing this effect.
“Media coverage can profoundly affect election outcomes,” the 2011 study “What’s in a Name? Coverage of Senator Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic Primary,” published in the journal Political Research Quarterly, proclaimed. “Specifically, gender bias in coverage can disadvantage female candidates. Historically, female candidates receive 50% less coverage than their comparable male counterparts.”
Read more
A resurfaced clip of JD Vance calling Kamala Harris and other prominent child-free Democrats “cat ladies” is making the rounds. It’s petty, yes, but it underscores a vital question: If procreation is what matters to Vance and his party, why aren’t they doing more to support women?
As this study noted, throughout the 2008 election, television newspeople referenced Clinton “more informally than her main male counterpart, Barack Obama, and the other male candidates in the race,” adding, “The names newspeople use to reference candidates paint a subtle, yet pervasive, picture of social status. By referencing female candidates informally, newspeople infantilize the candidates and detract from their ‘power and legitimacy.'”
“If it hadn’t been for Chris Matthew’s misogyny, the data actually would’ve kind of been basic,” Dr. Lilly Goren, a professor of political science and global studies at Carroll University and co-author of the study, said. “But Matthew’s constant, constant attacks on her and the way that he talked about her really made it statistically significant.”
What kind of misogyny, exactly? As the study noted, on January 8, 2008, Matthews took to television and said, “The reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a frontrunner is her husband messed around. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.” Failing to mention her Yale Law degree, her work as an attorney, her work as an advisor in the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal, or her body of work as First Lady. Not to mention that she was democratically elected by the people of New York state.
