Gender Self-Presentations in the 2020 U.S. Elections

Abstract

Ironically, the 2016 election of Donald Trump catalyzed progressive social change in the U.S.. A record number of women and people of color ran for the 2020 presidential nomination of the Democratic party. This election also saw the first openly gay candidate for president. Drawing on qualitative website and Twitter bio data, this article examines the gender self-presentations of twelve Democratic party primary presidential candidates--the eight men and four women who were in the primary debates in October 2019. We develop a new typology of gender self-presentation by classifying different approaches on a spectrum, ranging from gender traditional on one side to feminist on the other (with gender neutral and gender nontraditional in between). We find that most candidates simultaneously blend different types of gender self-presentations in their campaigns. For both men and women in the 2020 election, traditional self-presentations are the least common and gender neutral self-presentations are the most common. For women, nontraditional self-presentations de-emphasize the traditional role of motherhood, use stereotypically masculine language, or emphasize nontraditional gender career experiences. In contrast, for the men, the nontraditional self-presentations were more narrow and stayed solely in the domain of fatherhood. Finally, feminist self-presentations emphasize women’s social and political interests as women, either through the use of pronouns in their Twitter bios or through a discussion of feminist policy issues in websites. While both male and female candidates emphasize feminist issues, the men often do so by drawing on traditionally masculine language or highlight gender stereotypes as male protectors over vulnerable women. Together, these findings suggest that women’s identities as candidates draw on a wider, more multifaceted, range of gender self-presentations. This nuanced typology can be applied to future research on gender and elections.