The XX Factor: What women really think.

Re: Man, Woman, Candidate

In response to your perceptive comments, Emily: I agree that Hillary can seem to lack empathy, and that's what might make her seem a "pretender" to many Americans. But what the paper I cited starts to get at--and what I'm really wondering about--are the ways in which gender powerfully shape the way we "read" somebody, even when we think it doesn't. In other words, you and I might think we have a "pure" take on Hillary--that we'd feel the same way about her if she were a man. But as Lisa Belkin's column in The New York Times today on gender on workplace perceptions indicates, the exact same "tough" or angry behavior is frequently read as abrasive in women, but seen as authoritative in men.

Belkin quotes from a pretty interesting-sounding study by Victoria Brescoll at Yale in which a man and women are given an "angry" script and a "sad script" to use in a job interview: the angry man was seen as most hireable, then the sad woman, then the sad man, and, last, the angry woman. (Caveat: I haven't read the study myself, so don't know how well-executed it is.)