Women and the Presidency

Despite women running for the U.S. presidency for more than a century, no woman has served in the nation’s top office. Research on women and the presidency documents the gender dynamics at play in individual campaigns and contests, profiles prominent women candidates, and assesses the ways in which masculinity remains a particularly strong force in presidential politics. Women also play a central role in evaluating and selecting presidents, with a gender gap in presidential vote choice persisting for over four decades. While voters express little overt bias against electing a woman, research demonstrates how gender stereotypes and electability biases create differences for women candidates in candidate evaluation, media coverage, and campaign strategy. 

The U.S. Presidency as Gendered Institution

Sally Kenney describes the gendering of institutions as “the ways in which political institutions reflect, structure, and reinforce gendered patterns of power.”1 For nearly all of U.S. history, the processes and practices in U.S. political institutions have reinforced patterns of power that advantage masculinity and men. Nowhere has this been truer than in the U.S. presidency, where the privileging of masculinity has benefited men as candidates and officeholders. While the most overt evidence of gender power allocation in the U.S. presidency comes in the fact that no woman has ever held the nation’s highest office, the dominance of masculinity is evident in the gender expectations of candidate and officeholders, the language and symbols upheld, and the actions of and interactions between those navigating presidential politics. 

Despite the stubbornness of masculine dominance in U.S. presidential politics, a key feature of gendered institutions is their capacity for change. For example, after Jackson Katz argues that “presidential politics has long been the site of an ongoing cultural struggle over the meanings of American manhood,” he goes on to document how presidential candidates and officeholders have responded to gains in women’s rights and disruptions of gender norms over time.2 Sometimes, as has been most evident in Republican presidential politics since 2016, that response has been through reassertion of traditional gender norms and power dynamics that uphold the type of patriarchal masculinity most pervasive throughout U.S. history. But this period has also provided examples of change, wherein both women and men candidates have offered critiques of hyper-masculine approaches to presidential leadership and leaned further into images of U.S. presidents that also uplift stereotypical traits, expertise, and experiences that are most often associated with femininity and women. 

Of course, the U.S. presidency – and U.S. politics more broadly – is also a race-gendered institution defined by the dominance of whiteness and white masculinity.3 Challenging single-axis approaches to understanding gendered and raced dynamics requires recognizing that while race and gender have always organized presidential power dynamics, they were rendered invisible based on the assumption that the race default was white and the gender default was male.4

Voter Attitudes Toward a Woman President

In January 2024, 93% of Americans – including 99% of Democrats and 87% of Republicans – told Gallup that they would vote for a qualified woman nominee of their party for president. This is up from 54% in 1958 and has been steady for over two decades.5 But this data may mask bias that individuals feel reluctant to self-report. A September 2025 survey by Breakthrough Campaigns reported that 40% of voters personally know someone who they believe would not vote for a woman for president.6 Asked less directly about their support for a woman president, nearly one-third of Republicans (and 15% of Democrats) said that having a woman as president would make the U.S. less respected by the rest of the world in a 2023 Pew survey.7 Semra Sevi and Can Mekik conducted a list experiment during the 2024 presidential election that indirectly captured whether or not the statement “a woman serving as president” upset respondents. They determined that about 16% of respondents expressed this sentiment.8

Using experimental methods to measure the effect of candidate gender on vote choice, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden found a gender penalty in vote choice for women presidential candidates – unlike women congressional candidates – in general election contests,9 while Jon Green, Brian Schaffner, and Sam Luks found a preference for women over men candidates in hypothetical Democratic presidential primary match-ups.10 Beyond vote choice, 36% of all adults in Pew’s July 2023 survey  said it was either extremely or somewhat important to them that the U.S. elects a woman president in their lifetime.11 Women (42%) were more likely than men (28%), and Democrats (57%) more likely than Republicans (14%), to express this desire. 

Does women’s greater desire to see a woman president in their lifetime make them more likely to back a woman presidential candidate? Party affiliation remains the most important indicator of vote choice in general elections, dampening the influence – positive or negative – of candidate gender.12 The more likely place for any gender affinity effects is in primary elections, where there is no variation in candidate party.13 Even there, however, some research has indicated that gendered leadership styles instead of candidate gender matter more to women and men voters.14For more, see overview of Voter Attitudes Toward Women in Politics

This does not negate the potential for women presidential candidates to energize or inspire women, however. For example, Stephanie DeMora and colleagues found that reminding highly-educated white women about Hillary Clinton’s history-making candidacy in 2016 increased their enthusiasm, which then had a positive effect on their political ambition.15 In interviews with first-time women candidates from election 2018, they found half of the women mentioned Clinton as a positive influence on their decision to run for office. However, Chris Bonneau and Kristin Kanthak found that the positive effects of Clinton’s presidential bid on women’s political ambition were specific to her supporters and not to women generally.16

Gendered Effects in Presidential Voter Behavior and Vote Choice 

While there is not strong evidence of a gender affinity effect in presidential voting, women have been more likely than men to vote for the women who have been major-party presidential nominees due to party alignment. More specifically, the gender gap in presidential vote choice – whereby women have been more likely than men to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee – has been persistent since 1980.17 Because the two women who have been major-party presidential nominees to date have been Democrats, they have – like their male counterparts – benefited from women’s partisan preference. In 2016, women were 13 points more likely than men to vote for Hillary Clinton. That difference hardly changed in 2020, when women backed Joe Biden by a 12-point margin. In 2024, Kamala Harris’ advantage among women over men was 10 points. Even in 2012, when no woman was on the presidential ticket, women were 10 points more likely than men voters to back Democratic incumbent Barack Obama. For more, see overview of Women Voters

CAWP’s tracking of this data reveals the diversity in presidential vote preferences among women by categories such as race, age group, marital status, education, and religious affiliation.18 Ninety-two percent of Black women, for example, voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Slightly higher majorities of Black women backed Clinton in 2016 (94%) and Obama in 2012 and 2008 (96%). These data demonstrate the consistency of Democratic Party support among Black women, regardless of candidate race and gender. However, this does not mean that gender and race play no role in voter evaluation or preferences. In 2024, 34% of Black women voters – the most of any race x gender subgroup – told the Associated Press’ VoteCast that the fact that Harris would be the first female president was the single most important factor for their vote.19

Voters’ gendered traits may be more predictive of vote choice than voter sex. Specifically, alignment with stereotypically masculine traits predicts support for Republicans while alignment with stereotypically feminine traits predicts support for Democrats.20 Elisabeth Gidengil and Dietlind Stolle evaluate this finding at the presidential level, finding a large gender gap in support for Donald Trump between “hypermasculine men” and “hyperfeminine women.”21 Relatedly, studies utilizing multiple measures of sexism – scales to determine levels of hostile sexism, support of traditional or egalitarian sex roles, and attitudes toward women – found that voting for Trump in 2016 was correlated with higher levels of sexism, among both women and men voters, in ways that were dissimilar from prior elections.22 Notably, hostile sexism was also a predictor of support for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in a one-on-one 2016 Democratic primary match-up.23

Four years later, when Trump was challenged by Biden, hostile sexism was again a significant predictor of voting for Trump. Likewise, voters with higher levels of racial resentment were more likely to vote for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. 24 Chaerim Kim and Jane Junn’s analysis found that racial resentment increased the likelihood of voting for Trump in 2020 by 64%, more than the 13% gain among voters with higher levels of hostile sexism.25 Jonathan Knuckey and Adrienne Mathews found that while both sexism and racial resentment negatively influenced evaluations of then-vice-presidential-nominee Kamala Harris in the 2020 presidential election, party identification, ideology, and racial resentment had larger effects than sexism; they found these factors also predicted support for other Democrats.26 In an attempt to further isolate the effects of Harris’ gender and race on voter behavior, Alexandra Filindra and E.J. Fagan conducted a survey experiment on white voters and found that support for the Democratic ticket in 2020 dropped among white voters who expressed the highest levels of racial resentment after they were exposed to a treatment that mentioned Harris.27

Perceived threats to masculine dominance have been influential to presidential support for Trump since 2016.28 Using data from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), Melissa Deckman and Erin Cassese found that support for Trump was strongly correlated with perceptions that American society has become too soft and feminine.29 By 2024, 73% of Republicans expressed fear that gender progress had yielded a “society as a whole has become too soft and feminine.”30 Trump leaned into, and likely activated, fears about precarious masculinity and threats to men in each of his presidential campaigns. This was evident in an October 2024 CBS/YouGov survey where 84% of men and women who agreed that efforts in the U.S. to promote gender equality have “gone too far of late” reported their intention to vote for Donald Trump.31 While his masculine-focused strategies did not waver when running against men or women, Trump’s emphasis on masculinity and activation of backlash to gender progress created distinct conditions for the women running for president and vice president in the past three presidential elections.32

Evaluation of Women Presidential Candidates 

Majorities of Americans told Pew in July 2023 that the gender of a president would not matter when it came to their capacity to work out compromises, maintain a respectful tone in politics, be honest and ethical, stand up for what they believe in, and work well under pressure. However, on each of these measures, respondents who did indicate that women would differ from men were far more likely to say that a woman president would perform better than a man.33 Women and Democrats expressed the greatest faith that a woman president would perform better than a man on these measures. Using evidence from the 2016 presidential election, Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Debra Leiter found that those voters with high levels of gender and racial resentment were the most likely to hold women presidential candidates to higher standards than men when evaluating their capacity to do the job.34

On policy, nearly half of respondents to Pew’s 2023 survey believed a woman president would be better than a man at handling education (46%) and health care (45%). A majority of respondents said the gender of a president would make no difference on their ability to handle stereotypically masculine issues like crime (66%) and national security/defense (68%).35 Previous research showing women’s perceived deficit on national security/defense revealed a bias that could be particularly damaging to their presidential prospects.36 More recently, Mirya Holman and colleagues found that Hillary Clinton – a former U.S. senator and secretary of state – received lower leadership evaluations than her male opponents Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders when voters were primed to think about terrorist threats in the context of election 2016.37 In another study of voters in 2016, Elizabeth Simas found that when voters were primed to believe there were high levels of threat in the political environment, they rated Hillary Clinton lower and were less likely vote for her.38

Nichole Bauer, Moriah Harman, and Erica Russell tracked voter perceptions of 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates, which included a record six women, and found evidence of gender stereotypic penalties whereby ambitious women were perceived as less warm and likable than ambitious men.39 These negative ratings subsided over the course of the campaign, but they signal some persistence in gendered standards that women candidates navigate on the campaign trail. More common in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary were lingering perceptions that a woman nominee would be less electable against Donald Trump, with scholars finding that this electability bias reduced voters likelihood of selecting a woman nominee.40 Regina Bateson characterizes these doubts as “strategic discrimination,” defined as “when an individual hesitates to support a candidate out of concern that others will object to the candidate’s identity.”41 When she told individuals who opposed Trump that winning male votes would yield Democratic victory in 2020, they were less likely to believe that women primary candidates would be well-positioned to beat Donald Trump. Electability bias against a woman presidential nominee persisted in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.42

Media Coverage of Women Presidential Candidates       

While much of the literature on media coverage of women candidates below the presidential level has shown a decline in gender bias and fewer differences with men in coverage amounts, types, and tone, presidential elections remain a site more likely to yield gendered media coverage. Women candidates remain less common at the presidential level, presidential politics remain especially associated with men and masculinity, and presidential elections receive significantly more coverage – including coverage across a wide range of media types and sites – than campaigns at any other level of office. 

In an analysis that stretches from the 1800s to 2008, Erika Falk argued that the press has historically trivialized women’s presidential candidacies and portrayed them in stereotypical ways.43 Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign offered an opportunity to evaluate if conditions had changed for women presidential candidates, especially when they were viewed – as Clinton was – as equally strong competitors to men. Multiple analyses of media coverage of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary election found that Clinton received similar amounts of coverage as Democratic opponent Barack Obama.44 But Clinton’s coverage was not the same as Obama’s. For example, she received more negative coverage than Obama and faced more media attention about whether and when she would exit the Democratic race than was typi­cal of presidential nomination coverage.45 Most notably, media coverage of Hillary Clinton in 2008 – and especially cable news coverage – was filled with sexist remarks, from Glenn Beck describing Clinton as a “stereotypical bitch” to Tucker Carlson stating, “When she [Hillary Clinton] comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.”46 Governor Sarah Palin, selected as the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008, was also portrayed in gendered and often sexist ways, and she faced questions about her qualifications and capacity to do the job – especially with young children – that men did not.47

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• 33

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