Voters Penalize Uncertain Competence More Strongly For Women Than Men

Why This Question Matters

Voters routinely rely on cues about candidates' competence when forming impressions and choosing whom to support. Tessa Ditonto investigates whether the same competence information produces different effects when attached to a female versus a male candidate—a difference that would reveal how gender stereotypes shape not just baseline attitudes, but the way voters process new information.

How the Study Tests It

Ditonto uses two dynamic process-tracing experiments in which subjects receive sequential information about hypothetical candidates' competence and then report evaluations and vote intentions. The design varies the candidate’s gender and the presence or ambiguity of competence-related information, and includes a manipulation of facial-feature composition intended to convey competence, to test whether physical cues interact with gendered reactions to competence signals.

Key Findings

• When a candidate's competence is called into doubt, subjects evaluate her less favorably and are less likely to vote for her when she is a woman than when she is a man.
• Evaluations of female candidates are more sensitive to competence-related information: women’s favorability and vote probabilities drop more sharply in response to negative or ambiguous competence cues than men’s do.
• Manipulating facial-feature composition to portray competence did not alter the gendered pattern: the interaction between gender and competence information remained even when facial cues were varied.

Why This Matters for Political Behavior

These results suggest gender-based stereotypes can operate indirectly by shaping how voters weigh competence information, not only by producing baseline biases. That mechanism helps explain why female candidates may be more vulnerable to doubts about their qualifications and why identical competence information can produce asymmetric electoral effects.

Implications and Next Steps

The findings point to practical consequences for campaign messaging and candidate presentation, and encourage further work to trace these dynamics in real-world campaigns and across different electorates. Ditonto's experimental approach highlights how information-processing differences contribute to gender gaps in candidate evaluation and vote choice.