Hillary's Advantage: Being a She

The Hillary juggernaut, now in full rumble, has shaken loose an old question about gender and prejudice: Does a major-party candidate lose an important number of votes by being a she instead of a he?

Sure, a recent poll says 92 percent of Americans would vote for a woman presidential candidate, but it's well known that people interviewed by pollsters want to appear more broad-minded than they really are. With more oblique methods of measuring attitudes, others argue that as much as 25 percent of the population might have a problem voting for a Madame President.

And yet according to this study of people's voting behavior in Finland, there's also an advantage to being the female candidate: Women like you. They rate you as more beautiful than men do. And, more importantly, they vote for you.

Indeed, according to the paper by the economists Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl and Panu Poutvaara,

In a hypothetical election, we furthermore observe that female respondents tend to favor female candidates, while male respondents tend to vote equally often for men and women. Controlling for choices of the most beautiful, most competent, and most trustworthy candidate in a linear probability model confirms this general picture: female respondents tend to vote for women to a larger extent than men tend to vote for men.

The main point of their research was to study the effect of attractiveness on political fortunes -- they add to evidence that being rated as attractive helps you get votes. Still, if women are kinder to women in those ratings, and more inclined to vote for women, while Testostero-Americans show no such solidarity, then maybe people have been asking the wrong question here. Maybe the issue is not how much being female hurts a candidate, but how much it helps.

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