A Delicate Hand or Two-Fisted Aggression? How Gendered Language Influences Candidate Perceptions

• Published date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211064884
• Date: 01 May 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(3) 353–365

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211064884

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A Delicate Hand or Two-Fisted Aggression?

How Gendered Language Inf‌luences

Candidate Perceptions

Damon C. Roberts

1

and Stephen Utych

2

,

Abstract

Gendered language is seemingly found everywhere in American politics. We test the impact that gendered language has on voter

support for a candidate, using a validated dictionary of words rated as highly masculine or feminine. In three experimental

studies, we f‌ind that the use of feminine language causes individuals to perceive political candidates as more liberal. Additionally,

liberals tend to prefer candidates who use feminine language, and conservatives prefer candidates who use masculine language,

regardless of the sex of the candidate. These effects are mostly mediated, however, by perceptions of candidate ideology caused

by the use of language.

Keywords

gender, language, stereotypes, experimental methods

Gender plays a prominent, and likely increasingly important,

role in the political world. Typically, work on gender focuses

on concepts like gender stereotyping, which has vital im-

portance for how women are viewed in politics. However,

this work often focuses on how broad concepts (Bauer, 2015;

Winter, 2010) and classes of words (Gaucher, et al., 2011) are

assumed to have gendered connotations. We argue that words

can operate in more subtle ways, as specif‌ic words are likely

to be viewed as masculine or feminine. Indeed, recent work in

political science has developed and validated a dictionary of

words rated on the dimension of masculinity and femininity

(Roberts and Utych, 2020), allowing for a more expansive

view of how gendered language can work in more subtle

ways than is uncovered in traditional work on gender ste-

reotypes. Mendelberg et al. (2014) show that female view-

points are often times discounted in discussions. Further, they

show that, in the situations were female viewpoints are

recognized due to the network’s structure, the perspectives of

the female participants do change the deliberation and its

outcomes (Mendelberg et al., 2014). This further demon-

strates that the prevalence of masculinity and femininity

matter in political situations.

Furthermore, gender and language work together to shape

our perceptions of the world most obviously through issue

framing (Bracic, et al., 2018) and priming (Schaffner, 2005;

Winter, 2010). As we communicate with one another, word

choice expresses not only your message but also opinions,

biases, and perspectives, either explicitly or implicitly. For

example, historically, when we use a generic pronoun such as

“they,”men are more likely than women to assume the person

or the description of the noun as a “he”(Gastil, 1990). Due to

this preexisting research, one wonders how language, gender,

and partisanship may be interconnected. We of course are not

alone to advance the argument that gender is heavily involved

in partisan stereotypes (see Winter, 2010). We depart from

these other scholars by arguing that these primes to gender

based partisan stereotypes do not have to be heavy-handed

but instead can be quite subtle. To do this, we examine the

effects that the use of words stereotyped to be either mas-

culine or feminine by a candidate will have on the level of

support co-partisan voter expresses. We argue that voters do

use gendered language as an ideological cue, and as a result

we expect that the degree of congruence with the use of

masculine or feminine language with gender-based partisan

stereotypes will, in part, be used as a basis of supporting that

candidate. We argue that gender-based partisan stereotypes

can be quite subtle and have effects on the degree of support

voters express towards candidates.

We f‌ind that political candidates are seen as more liberal

when they use feminine language, compared to masculine or

1

University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

2

Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

Corresponding Author:

Stephen Utych, Department of Political Science, Boise State University, 1910

University Drive–MS 1935, Boise, ID 83725, USA.

Email: stephenutych@boisestate.edu