We have been dropping enough hints
Oh come ON.
I dunno. I guess you could study this systematically and someone probably should. It does seem like when women are running, the threshold is lower for controversies that are deemed to overshadow a campaign, e.g. Warren/DNA, Gillibrand/Franken, Klobuchar/staff (or Hillary/email).
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 10, 2019
Oooooooh yes I guess you could systematically study whether or not women are subject to more disparaging commentary than men are, why has no one ever thought to do that???
Much acid rejoindering.
Decades of studies about this issue, as well as a profusion of regular, on-going work examining implicit bias and sexism/racism in media. I’ve got to believe you know this, but this makes critical commentary sound like a matter of shallow opinion and sensitivity.
— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) February 11, 2019
Just could be…. I dunno either:)
— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) February 10, 2019
https://twitter.com/glosswitch/status/1094978799316422657
I was listening to Pod Save America this morning, in which the guests were discussing the puzzling phenomenon of voters who voted for Obama and then for Trump. ‘Hm’, one says, ‘what could have caused that? It’s not a race issue, if they were willing to vote for a black man’…. Wow, what a stumper. I can’t imagine what characteristic the Democratic candidates in 2008/2012 and 2016 didn’t share, that might have led people to vote for one and against the other. The world may never know.
Wow, what could it be, so puzzling.
Either it honestly did not occur to them, or they knew very well what the answer was but didn’t dare to say it; which is worse?
Butter emails.
guest, I think there is a third possibility – they don’t believe the answer, even though it stares them in the face. I know quite a few Obama voters who refused to vote for Hillary. If you mention her being a woman, that will always be met with some high-faultin’, windy version of “nuh uh”. Hillary was [fill in the blank], and they just couldn’t vote for that. E-mails – although the use of private servers was neither illegal nor particularly rare when she accepted the job at State. Her voice? Damn, that’s a sexist thing, and no one seems to realize it. Lack of warmth? Again, Trump is not warm. He is the opposite of warm, and he’s downright prickly. So, not really warmth. It’s…woman warmth. A woman who is not sufficiently warm and loving…but, of course, whenever she did act warm and loving, she was soft. Weak. Not strong enough to lead our troops, or our country.
I had a long discussion with a friend of mine who is consistently liberal and Democrat in his voting. He chose to vote for a third party (had to write it in; none of them made the ballot here) because he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary. Why not? sez I. “She’s too ambitious”, sez he. “You wouldn’t say that if she were a man”, sez I. “All presidential candidates are ambitious; they wouldn’t run for president if they were not.”
To his credit, he had the insight to realize what I was saying, and recognize (for the first time, after a mere two years) that he was putting on a sexist attitude by expecting women to not be ambitious. He never realized he did that, because he never stopped to think about it at all…woman? Ambition bad. Man? Ambition means he’s a go-getter and will get things done.
I have heard no one give me anything I consider a good, solid reason to vote for Trump over Hillary. Yes, she voted for the Iraq war – so did almost everyone else in Congress, and the information they received was being filtered through Dick Cheney, so she may have thought it was a good decision. Or maybe she just didn’t want to appear weak. Either way, I think it was a bad decision. But in the end, giving the orange fascist the nuclear codes because Hillary has flaws (and she does; so do I, but I would vote for me for president, except I don’t think I would want that job. It’s not in the area of my expertise) is a truly bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea.
guest,
That’s a tough one, but I think it has something to do with beer.
2016: “I would totally vote for a woman, just not Hillary! If Elizabeth Warren had run, I would support her!”
2019: “Well, Warren has this ‘Pocahontos’ thing, so I can’t vote for her. Klobuchar is mean to her staff. Gillibrand was mean to Al Franken. Harris is too ambitious. We need a candidate who doesn’t have baggage, someone like, say, Joe Biden! Oh, I would totally support a woman, if only a suitable one was running. I like AOC — too bad she isn’t old enough to be eligible!”
2027: “Oh, I can’t support AOC …..”
I dunno if this is a to be fair, but Clare Malone is always hammering this home on the podcast and Nate seems to be fairly receptive… Micah probably a bit moreso
Well it’s even MORE not in the area of expertise of the current holder of the office. The fact that you even HAVE an area of expertise puts you way beyond Darth Cheeto’s qualifications for the job. Not to disparage you in any way, but it is a very low bar to clear. As I’ve said before, there are houseplants and dead people who would make better presidents than Trump.
@8, yeah, I read this more as “I dunno if there’s a way to come up with a 538-like data-driven analysis that would convince the naysayers that controversies around female candidates get blown up more, but someone should probably try anyway,” and less as “I dunno if media are harder on female candidates.” Because data analysis is his thing.
I could be wrong though. And even if that’s what he meant, he probably could have phrased it better.
There is plenty of data-driven analysis on this subject–I won’t insult anyone here by posting the links (to Google and Google Scholar) for the search ‘data analysis women in media’.
#7 Screechy
Got ya covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhZRDoGZg00
@11, I don’t need to be convinced that women as a class are treated unfairly in the media, believe me. But lots of people (predictably) are skeptical of that reality, and wondering aloud whether an analysis exists that would convince those skeptics is different from saying that the topic hasn’t been or can’t be studied. Some people are completely unconvinceable on this topic, and acknowledging that fact doesn’t alter the reality that women are treated unfairly.
Cressida, I don’t read his comment as wondering if studies exist. He seems to be unaware that studies exist…someone could study this, someone should study this. That could just be sloppy wording, a common thing on Twitter. But it reads more like someone who assumes that no such thing has been done, but might be important enough to deal with…for someone else, of course, not for the tweeter.
@14, I said studies “that would convince those skeptics.”
I dunno, I guess someone should look into this. Has anyone looked into this? Hello? *tap tap*. Is this thing even on?
I don’t think anything is going to convince people that are ‘skeptical’ that women are treated unfairly. Except, anecdotally, when men’s ambitious daughters face sexism.
I’m not sure Silver is asking whether women in general, or even specifically women candidates, are treated unfairly in the media. I think he is seeking a study of the narrow question of whether the threshold for controversies is lower (however that might be defined or measured) for women. It’s entirely possible that this question has been studied in appropriate detail, but I don’t know that a general analysis of media fairness would address it.
I also don’t see Silver’s tweet, with little context, as indicating he suspects such a study would show fair treatment re controversies. It seems to me he thinks otherwise, and wants someone to do the analysis.
A long way to say I agree with Cressida in #10.
This came out a couple of days ago, but the NYT actually addressed it head-on for once.
Ya I saw that headline.