Gendered Self-Promotion: Differences in How Voters Evaluate Women and Men Who Highlight Their Legislative Accomplishments

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that women can face a punishment from voters for engaging in self-promotion. Self-promotion, highlighting your accomplishments, can be detrimental to women because such behavior violates feminine stereotypic expectations that women be modest and humble. I argue and show that voters do not punish women for engaging in self-promotion but there are different styles of self-promotion that are more beneficial to women than others. I argue that women will be most successful when they use a communal style of self-promotion that emphasizes feminine stereotypic qualities, such as compromise. Conversely, I argue that agentic forms of self-promotion, which draw on masculine qualities, will be less successful for women because agency violates feminine expectations for women. I test the effects of communal and agentic self-promotion using two experiments. The result shows two key findings. First, voters do not punish women incumbents for using agentic styles of self-promotion, but women receive more positive evaluations with communal self-promotion. Second, voters are slightly more likely to reward men for communal self-promotion relative to women legislators.