Gender, Credibility, and Politics: The Senate Nomination Hearings of Cabinet Secretaries-Designate, 1975 to 1993

• Published date: 01 March 1997
• Author: Maryanne Borrelli
• Date: 01 March 1997
• DOI: 10.1177/106591299705000109
• Subject Matter: Articles

Gender, Credibility, and Politics:
The Senate Nomination Hearings
of Cabinet Secretaries-Designate,
1975 to 1993
MARYANNE BORRELLI, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE
This article demonstrates that men Senators use the confirmation hear-
ings of Cabinet Secretaries-designate to investigate nominees’ understand-
ing of the political norms governing legislative - presidential - departmental
relations. The status of the Secretary-designate as a Washington insider or
outsider therefore affects the confirmation hearing, outsiders being pre-
sumed to lack the requisite socialization and consequently being viewed as
less credible. In particular, women Secretaries-designate are more often
treated as outsiders (their political experience notwithstanding) and thus
encounter distinctive challenges in establishing their credibility before the
confirmation (later, authorization) committees. The credentialling of Sec-
retaries-designate through the confirmation process gives men Senators
extraordinary control over institutional developments within the national
executive branch: Legislators can delegitimize a nominee’s distinctive in-
sights, thereby structuring the political agenda at its most preliminary stage
and ensuring that change will be strictly incremental.
The constitutional requirement that presidential appointments be approved
by the Senate was intended to ensure the good character and competence of
executive officers. Senators have duly questioned nominees regarding poten-
tial conflicts of interest and have assessed their policy expertise. Senators have
also used the confirmation process, and most especially the confirmation hear-
ings, to oversee the departments and to advance their constituents’ interests
(Mackenzie 1981).
NOTE: The author would like to thank Lyn Kathlene (Purdue University) and Janet M.
Martin (Boudoin College) for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Socializing the presidential appointee to legislative-presidential politics
is, however, the most significant confirmation task. Typically conducted by a
nominee’s Senate authorization committee, confirmation hearings are the public
inauguration of an important and on-going relationship (Deering 1987). This
is the nominee’s formal introduction to the network in which he or she will
mediate conflicting pressures for increasingly scarce resources. It is therefore
entirely comprehensible that Senators would be attentive to appointees’ pro-
fessional credentials, programmatic priorities, and partisan ideology. But Sena-
tors are also and even more fundamentally concerned with each nominee’s
acceptance and practice of existent political folkways. In every hearing, Sena-
tors carefully establish that the new policymaker shares their understanding
of how decisions are to be made and implemented.
Confirmation hearings could therefore be expected to progress differently
for nominees with and without experience in Washington politics. A Cabinet
Secretary-designate with service in the Congress or in the executive branch
would presumably be viewed by Senate committee members as well-versed in
Washington’s political norms. The &dquo;rules of the game&dquo; having been mutually
acknowledged, this hearing would progress rapidly to a discussion of policies
and programs. A Secretary-designate untried in national office, however, would
be more cautiously received by Senate committee members. These nominees
would need to be legitimized before the committee, whose members would ‘
also be more concerned to examine and instruct the &dquo;outsider.&dquo; The first hy-
pothesis, then, is that Senators place greater confidence in presidential ap-
pointees who are Washington &dquo;insiders&dquo; and less confidence in presidential
appointees who are Washington &dquo;outsiders.&dquo;
&dquo;
Yet there is also a literature which indicates that men and women, inde-
pendent of their professional qualifications, are routinely accorded differing
degrees of credibility Scholars have, in fact, shown that judgments of charac-
ter and performance are often affected by gender stereotypes. An experimen-
tal study, for example, demonstrated that women attorneys were granted less
credibility than were men attorneys (Hodgson and Pryor 1984). An ethno-
graphic study found that women victims of crime were seldom judged believ-
able witnesses (Stanko 1982). In these instances, as in various others, the
observer’s gender role socialization caused him or her to discount the woman’s
qualifications: A woman could not be reliable because women were presump-
tively passive, dependent, sexually unpredictable, and emotional. Reviewing
this research, one scholar concluded that &dquo;whereas men, regardless of role or
rule, are assumed to possess credibility, women must earn credibility (D’Lugin
1
There has also been some investigation of the effects of racial stereotypes upon credibil-
ity, though this is an area much in need of further enquiry: see: Morrison 1992.
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1993: 185-86; emphasis in original). These findings oblige one to ask whether
women
are also disadvantaged in confirmation hearings, a query that becomes
only more pressing when one considers the environment and the mores which
confront women presidential appointees at these events.
The national executive branch is highly masculine in its personnel and in
its ideology Though many other nations have been led by a woman chief
executive, few women in the United States have held even &dquo;feeder&dquo; positions
for this office. Prior to the 1996 elections, only thirteen women had served as
governor, and a mere eleven had been elected to the Senate (CAWP 1995).
Within the national executive branch, only fifteen women had been appointed
to the Cabinet (the Baird nomination was later withdrawn) and fewer than
twenty-five had served at the highest levels of the White House staff (Tenpas
1996). The national executive branch has almost exclusively had men as its
leaders. With specific regard to presidential appointees, therefore, the confir-
mation process has been designed by men Senators to evaluate men Secretaries-
designate.
Ideology plays a significant role in explaining this predominance of men,
leadership and gender studies revealing that the prevailing executive ideology
is &dquo;masculinism.&dquo; This philosophy focuses upon men, &dquo;give [s] greater credence
to the potential men offer,&dquo; organizes societal power to men’s advantage, and
recommends action consistent with &dquo;masculine&dquo; values (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly
1995: 21; emphasis added). With particular regard to the executive branch,
these values include competitiveness, autonomy, and toughness (Duerst-Lahti
1997). Rather than functioning as a transformative leader, who relies upon
persuasion and inspiration, the executive is expected to be a transactional
leader who rules by command and punishment (Duerst-Lahti 1997; Bums
1978). Success is contingent upon the executive’s strength, aggression, and
determination-qualities traditionally (and stereotypically) associated with men.
In the executive branch as in the courtroom, then, the qualities deemed
essential to effective leadership are presumptively lacking in women. One could
therefore expect that women appointees would be received as outsiders in
their Senate confirmation hearings, even when their professional qualifica-
tions would appear to render them insiders. With policymaking dialogues
constrained by the woman Secretary-designate’s need to prove her credibility,
these gender biases could seriously compromise the appointee’s service as a
political executive.
This article tests these two hypotheses, one suggesting that the credibility
of presidential appointees in confirmation hearings is a function of their sta-
tus as Washington insiders or outsiders; and the other proposing that gender
biases cause Senate committee members to treat women presidential appoin-
tees as less credible than men appointees. In weighing these contentions, the
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research raises questions about the opportunities and constraints confronting
those who seek high executive office. It consequently challenges Senate con-
firmation standards and practices at their most fundamental level.
RESEARCH DESIGN
This study focuses upon confirmation hearings for Cabinet Secretaries-
designate. Because Cabinet members are at the nexus of legislative, presiden-
tial, and departmental politics, they have been subjected to close scrutiny
Though hearing procedures do vary slightly from committee to committee
(Deering 1987), there is consequently a greater degree of consistency among
those for the Cabinet. For this research, every hearing for a confirmed woman
Secretary-designate was examined, from 1975 to 1993, in order to see how
women
successfully navigated these events; the Baird withdrawal being unique,
her hearing was set aside for future study (Senate Committee on the Judiciary
1993b). Also analyzed were the confirmation hearings of the men who were
the women’s predecessors in the Cabinet.
The first two women to serve in the Cabinet did not have confirmation
hearings. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins was a member of Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s first Cabinet, whose Secretaries were approved without hearings
or floor debates. (Martin 1976: 13) Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)
Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby joined Eisenhower’s Cabinet in 1953. Having
confirmed Hobby’s appointment as the Administrator of the Federal Security
Administration earlier that same year, the Senate deemed a second hearing
...