America’s first female president figures to be judged more harshly than the men who occupied the Oval Office if history is any guide.

That’s the takeaway from a study by three political scientists, including one at UC Riverside. Their findings, published in the British Journal of Political Science last month, found that female heads of state in other countries faced higher standards and were less popular than men holding the same offices.

“The effect of the sex of a president on approval is very dramatic,” Miguel Carreras, an assistant professor of political science at UCR, said in a news release. “As researchers, we weren’t necessarily expecting such a large effect.”

The study comes as five female lawmakers – Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren – are running for 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Hillary Clinton made history in 2016 as the first woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee. Many of her supporters blame her loss to Donald Trump in part on what they saw as a double standard that put her email practices on par with Trump’s track record, which includes questions over his ties to Russia, bankruptcies, his statement that Mexico sends drug dealers and rapists over the border and sexual assault accusations by multiple women.

For their study, Carreras and researchers at Georgia State University and the University of Mississippi compared the approval ratings from the 1970s to 2017 of more than 150 male and female presidents in 20 Latin American and Asian democracies. They looked at how the public judged those presidents regarding corruption, security and the economy.

They found that female presidents enjoy shorter “honeymoon periods” right after taking office and that their approval ratings fall more sharply over their tenures than men. Female presidents “are, generally, viewed with a more critical eye than male leaders and their popular support suffers in return,” researchers wrote.

“Mounting corruption perceptions have essentially no effect on male presidents’ approval ratings but significantly, and substantially, damage public support for female presidents … the popularity of female leaders is, indeed, more sensitive to that of male leaders to terrorist attacks and homicide rates.”

Carreras told a UCR publication that women are stereotyped as soft and unable to handle a security crisis or war.

“But if they’re too ‘aggressive’ or try to show too much ‘masculinity,’ they might be accused of not being ‘nice’ or ‘feminine’ enough,” he was quoted as saying. “It’s a difficult line for women to walk when it comes to satisfying people; whichever direction they take, they’re likely to run into problems.”

Judged on looks?

There is a double standard when it comes to women running for or holding elected office, said Assemblywoman Eloise Reyes, D-Grand Terrace.

Female candidates often are questioned about their appearance “as opposed to looking at the substance … which is really what we need as a leader,” said Reyes, who ran for Congress in 2014 in a race won by Democrat Pete Aguilar before unseating Democratic incumbent Cheryl Brown to win an Inland Assembly seat two years later.

While the U.S. has yet to elect a female president, there’s no reason to think her experience will differ from her global counterparts, Carreras said in a phone interview Friday, February 22.

“In the short term, the goal (of the study) is to raise awareness” of bias, he said. “Once people elected a female president … we might be complacent (and think) male and female politicians have the same possibilities ” even though female politicians stand to face bias in how they’re judged.

Research studies on American elections “are showing that gender is no longer a barrier to electoral success,” said Marcia Godwin, a professor of public administration at the University of La Verne. “There is still a very obvious partisan divide, with fewer Republican women serving in state and national offices.”

That said, “Shifts in electability do not mean that female candidates are immune from criticisms based on gender,” Godwin said. “We have already seen several gendered narratives about the announced female candidates for president.”

As an example, Godwin pointed to characterizations of Klobuchar as a “mean girl” for her treatment of staff. “Supervisory issues have been raised more for women officeholders than men for decades,” she said.

Harris’ dating history and career as a prosecutor “have been put under a microscope,” Godwin said. “It could be argued that some that scrutiny just confirms the perception that she is a major candidate. However, it is difficult to avoid consideration of whether a male candidate would be treated the same way.”

“President Trump’s name calling of Elizabeth Warren as ‘Pocahontas’ is the most obvious example of gender stereotyping,” Godwin added. “An actual concern – whether Warren was truthful about her ethnicity on employment records – got turned into a gendered stereotype that is intended to diminish her standing and also is demeaning to Native American women.”

‘Different metrics’

While most people aren’t overtly racist or sexist, an implicit bias comes to play when judging female political candidates, said Renee Van Vechten, a political science professor at the University of Redlands.

“On the surface, Americans would say ‘Of course I would vote for a woman,’” she said. “But at the same time, evaluate those candidates by different metrics.”

People tend to subconsciously equate overconfidence, pushiness and being loud with strong leaders, and those qualities tend to be more associated with men than women, Van Vechten added.

Ultimately, the way to overcome gender bias is to have more women seek and win elected office, Reyes said.

“Hopefully, the more educated we are, the less likely we’re looking at how a woman dresses or wears her hair and the more concern we’ll have about what’s important in a leader,” she said.