Sexism Is Common but Rarely Costs Women Votes, Four-Country Study Shows

The Puzzle: Why Do Women Remain Underrepresented?

Experimental work often finds that female candidates can attract equal or greater support than men, yet women remain underrepresented and observational research documents pervasive sexism. Rosalind Shorrocks, Elizabeth Ralph-Morrow, and Roosmarijn de Geus set out to reconcile these mixed signals by asking whether voter sexism actually translates into lower vote shares for women in real elections.

What the Authors Did

The authors analyze observational data covering roughly 26,000 voters and 5,346 candidates from four established democracies: Australia, Canada, Britain, and the United States. They use measured voter attitudes toward gender (sexism), together with recorded vote choices and abstention behavior, to test whether sexist voters are less likely to support women candidates and whether abstention functions as an alternative response.

Key Findings

• In the United States, voters are slightly more likely to support women than men.
• In Australia, Canada, and Britain, there is no detectable overall preference for female or male candidates.
• Sexist attitudes are widespread across all four countries studied, but those attitudes do not predict lower vote support for women candidates.
• In the U.S. context, however, there is evidence that sexist partisans confronted with a woman from their own party choose abstention more often—suggesting nonvoting as a mechanism by which sexism can shape electoral outcomes.

Why This Matters for Representation and Research

These results complicate the simple story that sexist attitudes directly translate into vote penalties for women. Instead, the authors show that the relationship between sexism and electoral outcomes is contingent and can operate through turnout choices rather than straightforward vote switching. The findings carry implications for scholars of gender and representation and for practitioners seeking to boost women's descriptive representation: measurement of both vote choice and abstention matters, and mechanisms can differ across national contexts.