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How do gendered personalities, beyond biological sex, shape political ambition, and what does this reveal about the persistent sex gap in political ambition?

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 5, 2024

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The speaker discusses their research on political ambition, particularly focusing on how individual psychology and traits influence the decision to run for office, with a consideration of gender and socialization. They emphasize the importance of understanding the nuances of gender beyond the traditional binary classification of male and female. Drawing on the work of Monica McDermott, the speaker argues for a more continuous model of gender, encompassing a spectrum of masculinity and femininity rather than a simple dichotomy.

The speaker highlights existing literature that showcases the gender gaps in political behavior and ambition, pointing out that men generally exhibit higher political ambition while women often view themselves as less qualified despite having similar qualifications. The research utilizes the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) to measure masculinity and femininity, finding that higher masculine traits are positively correlated with nascent ambition for office, while higher feminine traits are negatively correlated.

The findings reveal that there is considerable heterogeneity among individuals regarding masculinity and femininity, and that a binary measure of sex still matters but doesn't capture the complexity of political behaviors. The speaker calls for researchers to adopt more granular approaches to studying gender in political contexts. They conclude by acknowledging the evolving nature of gender roles and the importance of understanding these complexities in relation to political participation and leadership.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Individual Variation in Political Ambition**: The author emphasizes a lifelong interest in understanding the psychological traits and variances among individuals that drive them to run for political office, particularly in the convideo of gender differences. The study aims to explore the complexities behind why some individuals are more politically ambitious than others.

2. **Beyond the Gender Binary**: The research seeks to move past the traditional binary conception of gender (male/female) by considering gender as a continuum that encompasses varying degrees of masculinity and femininity. This deeper examination aims to uncover the nuanced factors that affect political behavior and aspirations beyond simply categorizing individuals by sex.

3. **Socialization Across Lifespan**: The video highlights that gender differences in political ambition and behavior start from a young age due to socialization processes. Research indicates that children internalize gender stereotypes early on, which can influence their future ambitions, including the likelihood of running for political office.

4. **Impact of Masculinity and Femininity on Ambition**: The findings indicate that higher levels of masculine traits correlate positively with nascent political ambition, while higher levels of femininity correlate negatively. This pattern is noted for both men and women, suggesting that the traits associated with traditional masculinity may foster more political ambition and engagement.

5. **Call for Granular Gender Measurement in Research**: The author advocates for more sophisticated measures to capture the complexity of gender in political behavior studies. They suggest that understanding the continuous nature of masculinity and femininity can lead to richer insights into why certain individuals pursue political ambitions and how these traits intersect with socialization and identity in the contemporary political landscape.

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Here are some key quotes from the video that capture the author's main points:

1. **Personal Convideo of Research:**
- "I've always been interested as a scholar in thinking about the variation in individuals and their psychology and their traits that lead them to think about running for office and be ambitious and those who are not."

2. **Gender and Political Ambition:**
- "There is a vast amount of literature on political ambition and on gender gaps broadly in American political behavior and political behavior abroad."

3. **Moving Beyond Binary Conceptions:**
- "We wanted to dig down under this base division and see what's really driving... the distinction between men and women when it comes to... questions, whether it's political knowledge, whether it's domestic ambition and whether you run for office."

4. **Socialization and Gender:**
- "Socialization... is happening currently for gender... starts very early."

5. **Research on Political Leaders:**
- "66% of them draw a male leader... it starts very early."

6. **Ambition and Perceptions of Qualification:**
- "Women need to be encouraged, need to be asked, and are less likely to be asked or told you should run for office someday."

7. **Gender Traits and Political Ambition:**
- "Masculinity in particular is positively related to nascent ambition... higher you score on femininity, you are less likely to have thought about running for political office."

8. **Granularity in Gender Measurement:**
- "We hope that scholars will try to find ways to get more granular."

9. **Fluidity of Gender Roles:**
- "Gender identity and roles are becoming more fluid and more politicized in the United States."

10. **Calls for Refined Measures:**
- "For my co-author Carl and myself, we are just sort of pushing for more refined and granular measures to understand the complexity of gender and political behavior today."

These quotes highlight the focus on gender, political ambition, socialization, and the importance of nuanced research in understanding these dynamics.

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Here are some articles that align with the themes and discussions present in the video you , particularly focusing on gender, political ambition, and the nuances of masculinity and femininity in political behavior:

1. **"The Gender Gap in Political Ambition: A New Perspective on Gender and Politics"**
- This article explores the reasons behind the gender gap in political ambition, discussing socialization, differences in self-perception, and the impact of societal expectations on men and women.

2. **"Beyond the Binary: Understanding Gender as a Spectrum in Political Engagement"**
- This research piece argues for viewing gender beyond a binary framework and analyzes how a spectrum approach can inform our understanding of political participation and ambitions among different identities.

3. **"Socialization and Political Ambition: The Role of Gender and Personality Traits"**
- This article examines how personality traits, including masculine and feminine characteristics, influence an individual's motivation to pursue political office, providing empirical analysis on the variance between genders.

4. **"Masculinity, Femininity, and the Politics of Ambition: An Exploration of Gender Traits in Political Aspirants"**
- The authors investigate how societal traits associated with masculinity and femininity can affect individuals’ perceptions of their qualifications to run for office, incorporating qualitative and quantitative studies.

5. **"Redefining Gender: The Complexities of Identity in Political Behavior"**
- This paper looks at how shifting societal norms around gender identity impact political engagement and ambition, using recent data to illustrate changes in perceptions over time.

6. **"The Role of Mentorship and Socialization in Developing Political Leaders: The Influence of Gender"**
- This study discusses the importance of mentorship in encouraging political aspirations among women and examines how gender biases play a role in mentoring and development opportunities.

7. **"Cultural Stereotypes and Political Leadership: Gendered Perceptions and Their Impact on Ambition"**
- This article focuses on the stereotypes surrounding political leaders and how these impact the ambitions of individuals based on their gender, alongside an exploration of socialization processes.

8. **"Gender, Politics, and the Dichotomy of Self-Perception: How Masculinity and Femininity Influence Political Ambition"**
- This research highlights how self-perceptions rooted in gender identity influence individuals' aspirations to engage politically, and the broader implications for democratic participation.

9. **"Measuring Gender: Beyond Dichotomous Variables in Political Science Research"**
- This article critiques traditional measurement methodologies in political science and advocates for more nuanced approaches to understand gender in research, focusing on implications for political behavior analysis.

10. **"Navigating the Gendered Landscape of Political Candidacy: Barriers and Opportunities"**
- This paper investigates the challenges faced by female candidates in political settings, emphasizing the role of socialization, gender traits, and encouragement in building political ambition.

These articles collectively address the complexities of gender and political behavior, resonating with the themes found within the original video regarding political ambition, socialization, and the implications of gender traits on the pursuit of political office.

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I think there's, one of the major contexts of the work

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was, thinking about, personally,

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I've always been interested as a scholar

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in thinking about the variation in individuals

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and their psychology and their traits that lead them

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to think about running for office and be ambitious

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and those who are not.

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And then I also think for most, scholars

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and for most research,

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there's always something a little bit personal in it from

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their own experience to think about.

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And I think over, as I looked back on my, life as well,

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I was sort of intrigued by the notions of how masculinity

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and femininity affected my peers and myself as we grew up.

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There is a vast amount of literature on,

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political ambition

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and on gender gaps broadly in American political behavior

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and political behavior abroad.

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I generally study, domestic American politics,

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and a lot of that research has studies that show variation

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between men and women on participation,

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on political knowledge, on voting habits,

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on the desire to run for office.

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And there's a really rich literature, oftentimes,

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exemplified by the researchers fox

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and law list that look at the differences in men

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and women actually running for office,

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and the gaps that are there.

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Um, but what really motivated us was this ability to go

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beyond simply looking at gender or men

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and women using this measure, which is a classic measure,

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which has been used for decades by most

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of us gathering public opinion research.

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And by the American National Election study

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that turns into a dichotomous variable, a zero one,

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and we wanted to find ways to sort of push beyond that.

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And we had my co-author

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and I had interacted with a scholar named Monica McDermott,

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who wrote a book in 2016 that brought in this idea.

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And to me, my eyes just opened.

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And I thought, wow, there is so much research

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that could benefit from exploring moving past

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and beyond this binary conception of gender.

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It's a, it's frequently, I think,

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a still developing delineation and distinction.

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And it's, sometimes a difficult

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sort of distinction to make.

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There's a, a work of, current work,

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reviewing the literature in gender

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and psychology that starts the paper

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by saying gender slash sex.

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Um, almost using it synonymously

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before then trying to disentangle it.

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I think generally most researchers would attach sex to more

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of a biological origin,

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and then gender being more, sociological

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more about personality, more about socialization and traits.

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Uh, we really used our definition drawing back from the work

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on Monica, from Monica McDermott.

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And their, her definition was the construct Society is built

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over time to reflect behaviors

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and beliefs, thought to be typical of though

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by no means unique to the sexes and their roles in society.

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But there are many definitions of it.

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And analytically what we tried to do was

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to look at masculine

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and femininity as primarily how we thought about gender,

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these traits that we all have.

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And then the zero one dichotomous measure,

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the classic measure in political science we term as sex,

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I think you said in this area,

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but I generally think of it pretty broadly in in any number

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of areas in political behavior.

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And there's a, a wonderful article by Bittner

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and Goodyear grant in 2017

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that makes this argument very crystallized, this argument

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that essentially we have been conflating sex

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and gender in political behavior.

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Um, and they put forward some ways to potentially try

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to measure it without sort of settling on one.

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Uh, but the basic idea on some level is

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that you are simplifying the world

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between this dichotomous variable where for my co-author

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and I, we want to think about it more as a continuum,

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as gender, being able to go on a continuous scale of

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masculinity and femininity,

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and also in really kind of a blunt

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research method sort of way.

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We wanted to dig down under this base division

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and see what's really driving, you know, the distinction

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between men and women when it comes to all kinds of say

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of questions, whether it's political knowledge,

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whether it's domestic ambition

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and sort of, nascent ambition

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and whether you run for office, whether it's participation,

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whether it's voting, in an election,

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which candidate you prefer.

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Um, we think that there's value to sort of digging below

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and thinking about gender in a more granular

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and more nuanced way.

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It's a fantastic, sort of discussion

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and fantastic lecture really to sort of think about

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because there's, just a ton of work

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where scholars are exploring all the ways that,

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socialization happens.

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Um,

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and I think one of the ways that, what I would say to start

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with is that we know it starts very early.

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And so there's a lot of research now that shows that the,

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the difference between men

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and women as we are socialized is happening across our

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lifespans and is happening

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frequently in all kinds of interactions.

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Whether they're formal interactions and things like school

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and work, whether it's conversations, whether it's coaches

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or mentors or friends.

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That socialization is happening currently for gender

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and for politics.

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And so one of the great sort of recent research articles

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by Bose and our co-authors in 2022 uses a draw political

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leader test, which is pretty fascinating

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because it comes from the idea, from STEM fields

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of asking pe asking children to draw pictures

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of a scientist and looking at the gender sort of stereotypes

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around it, will they replicate this?

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But they do draw a political leader,

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and it's students who in US schools would be grade one

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to six and 66% of them draw a male leader

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and only 13% draw a female leader.

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And so it starts very early.

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And then when you look at even the candidate stage of

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where people would actually run for office, there's a lot

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of research that shows that, that, women need

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to be encouraged, need to be asked,

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and are less likely to be asked

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or told you should run for office someday.

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One of the most fascinating findings that comes out of,

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of the large scale research studies over time on this is

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that, women can, women potential candidates

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who could run for office will rate themselves

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as less qualified than their male counterparts

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with the same qualifications, right?

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So there's already this sort of built in, lower level

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of ambition and views of qualification that translate into,

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expressed ambition.

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I think you're right that you're seeing progress in terms of

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what you might consider,

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academic qualification attainment, levels

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of performance if you talk

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to most professors right, about this.

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Um, but oftentimes it doesn't translate to that next step.

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And our concern is really about that next step

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of being politically running for political office.

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There's some great questions embedded in a as well.

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Um, so, what we, use to,

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to measure masculine femininity is drawn from the work

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of Sandra Bam, a gender psychologist, originally

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conceived of in the 1970s, so 50 years ago, creating

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a way to measure masculine femininity

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by looking at descriptors

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and traits that would be considered sort of typical

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or ideal for men and women in society.

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And so, it has been one answer is sort of,

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it has been widely, validated, used,

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over time in different contexts.

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When you go to a web of science

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or to a Google scholar,

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it's been cited over 6,000 times now.

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There has definitely been critique

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and pushback on her conception as well.

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Um, but it is certainly the most prominent, so

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for example, one of the, the, the battery that we use,

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the BIM sex Rules inventory, we use the Brief Battery,

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which is an inventory

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that asks you descriptors about yourself that are masculine

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and feminine descriptors.

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And, why, the reason why we use the brief one is

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that BIM actually revised her original BSRI

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and cut out some of the items

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that I think if we looked at today, we would say,

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this is doesn't age well for, aspects,

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but even at the time would've been viewed

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as think more negative items.

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So for example, if you look at the original BSRI, one

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of the feminine traits is gullible

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and another one is childlike.

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Um, and those traits are not in the revised brief BSRI,

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which is what we used for this research study.

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Um, and so it's also the, the, the

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Instrument that is used in the Monica McDermott book

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that inspired a lot of our research.

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I've looked at political ambition in a number

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of different ways in my research,

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usually psychological ways I'm interested in

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how personality shapes it, whether that's your extroversion

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as a personality type, whether you might have some dark,

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traits like Machiavellianism.

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Uh, and so what we did was explore nascent ambition.

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And nascent ambition does, it does merit a a,

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a mini sort of capsule on it.

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Nascent ambition is usually studied,

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in the mass population and not among, elected leaders

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because the way that it's thought

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of is almost like the roots of political ambition.

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So you're sort of developing them over time.

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And that's really fascinating to us

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because it means we can study it in broad populations

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and see like what is determining who thinks about running

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for political office and who feels they're qualified to run

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for political office just at a base level.

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And so what we did is we used the BSRI

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to measure masculinity and femininity,

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and then we, we do have the binary measure that we consider

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for sex, the zero one,

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and we predict, whether you have thought about running

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for political office and whether you feel you're qualified

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to run for political office in our study.

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And what we find, I think what was sort

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of surprising about our findings on some level is just

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how robust and strong they were.

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Um, that is masculinity in particular

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is positively related to nascent ambition on both of those,

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items that I, that I mentioned for both men

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and women, if you're scoring higher in masculinity,

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you're more likely to respond

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that you've thought about running for political office

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and that you're qualified to run for political office.

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And then what we found also is that for femininity,

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it worked in the opposite direction.

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You are less likely to have thought about running

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for political office the higher you score on femininity,

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for both men and women.

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And it's sort of notable about the other surprising thing

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or for interesting thing to think about.

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One of the things that I think validates using these type

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of measures is that when you look at the distribution

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of masculinity and femininity in our sample,

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what you notice is there's a lot of heterogeneity, like men

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and women who I, people identify as men

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and as women both have score and high score on femininity

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and masculinity, there's real diversity to it.

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And even though men score slightly higher on masculine

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traits, it is not that much higher.

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Uh, women score high as well.

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And in femini in feminine traits,

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women score a little bit higher than men,

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but there's a lot of diversity underneath

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that binary measure.

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And so for us, we found pretty clearly that even

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with sex in the model, there is added value

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to having masculine and femininity when looking at this,

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phenomenon.

253
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I think it's, it's really interesting

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because, you know, I view,

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I don't wanna diminish our research,

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but I view it sort of as, you know, building on some of this

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excellent and wonderful gender research

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by a number of scholars.

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But the first thing for us was, you know,

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is there value added in doing this?

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And because you're looking back at 50 years of research

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books, articles, chapters about gender DAPs,

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and now all of that research to me, I see as well,

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what would happen if you could,

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if you were measuring masculinity, femininity

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as well as this?

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And it's important to note in our research that the sex,

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that sex, the sexual identity measure,

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the binary still matters.

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Women are more, are less likely to have nascent ambition,

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but it is much lower effect than masculinity is

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in our, in our estimates.

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And so the implications are that we hope

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that scholars will try to find ways to get more granular

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and precise measures of of gender.

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I mean, a lot of the studies

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that use the simple binary measure have scholars

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that understand gender and socialization

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and you know, they're not like foolish about this.

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They sort of understand it,

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but it's difficult to find ways to measure it properly.

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One of the in things that inhibits it is

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that it's difficult in most large scale survey projects

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to have 20 to 40 questions

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to measure gender when they are used to just doing one.

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Um, and there have been some scholars that have tried

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to use like single item measures that would just ask you,

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on this scale, how masculine are you?

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How feminine are you? But they don't seem

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to provide the leverage that something like the BSRI does.

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Now, in terms of society and broader and future studies

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and current studies, I mean, I see a, the,

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that bm, even though it was developed 50 years ago,

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society has changed and shifted.

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But I still feel a lot of these things intuitively for me,

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what my, my guess is, is this, what's happening

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with measures like the BSRI is that men

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as they've are socialized to be a little more caring

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and to think of others a little bit more,

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are gaining more femininity.

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Women are gaining more of the masculinity,

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they're becoming more socialized to being leaders,

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to being aggressive, to being, you know,

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forceful in their lives.

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And I think that's excellent.

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So I would imagine there's been a bit of a, of a merging

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of these things in a way.

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And then the other thing that's happening is

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that gender identity and roles are becoming more fluid

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and more politicized in the United States

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and probably around the world.

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And most, most democracies,

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presidential campaigns are in the United States context at

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least, are using masculine appeals.

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Um, almost trying to out masculine other candidates.

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And we need to know what determines

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who receives those sort of appeals.

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And maybe it's about the masculinity

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and femininity that they have in their traits.

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And we can't measure that if we just use the binary.

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We also have prominent women running

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for political office of major

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Presidential candidate currently in the United States

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that could be the first female president leaders

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around the world, right?

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And we sort of wanna know what drives this, like, is it,

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does it have to do partially with the masculine femininity

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that those individuals have that have helped guide them

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to be more entered into the political sphere?

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And so for, for my co-author Carl

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and myself, we are just sort of pushing for more refined

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and granular measures to understand the complexity of gender

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and political behavior today without denying that

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that binary conception matters in our like everyday lives

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and in politics as well.

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Um, but that there's something for gendered personality

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that is an additive value.

Exploring Gender and Political Ambition

00:00:00 - I think there's, one of the major contexts of the work was, thinking about, personally, I've always been interested as a scholar in thinking about the variation in individuals and their psychology and their traits that lead them to think about running for office and be ambitious and those who are not. And then I also think for most, scholars and for most research, there's always something a little bit personal in it from their own experience to think about. And I think over, as I looked back on my, life as well,

00:00:34 - and femininity affected my peers and myself as we grew up. There is a vast amount of literature on, political ambition and on gender gaps broadly in American political behavior and political behavior abroad. I generally study, domestic American politics, and a lot of that research has studies that show variation between men and women on participation, on political knowledge, on voting habits, on the desire to run for office.

00:01:06 - exemplified by the researchers fox and law list that look at the differences in men and women actually running for office, and the gaps that are there. but what really motivated us was this ability to go beyond simply looking at gender or men and women using this measure, which is a classic measure, which has been used for decades by most of us gathering public opinion research. And by the American National Election study that turns into a dichotomous variable, a zero one,

Beyond Binary Gender in Research

00:01:39 - And we had my co-author and I had interacted with a scholar named Monica McDermott, who wrote a book in 2016 that brought in this idea. And to me, my eyes just opened. And I thought, wow, there is so much research that could benefit from exploring moving past and beyond this binary conception of gender. It's a, it's frequently, I think, a still developing delineation and distinction. And it's, sometimes a difficult

00:02:07 - There's a, a work of, current work, reviewing the literature in gender and psychology that starts the paper by saying gender slash sex. almost using it synonymously before then trying to disentangle it. I think generally most researchers would attach sex to more of a biological origin, and then gender being more, sociological more about personality, more about socialization and traits. we really used our definition drawing back from the work

00:02:42 - And their, her definition was the construct Society is built over time to reflect behaviors and beliefs, thought to be typical of though by no means unique to the sexes and their roles in society. But there are many definitions of it. And analytically what we tried to do was to look at masculine and femininity as primarily how we thought about gender, these traits that we all have. And then the zero one dichotomous measure, the classic measure in political science we term as sex,

Rethinking the Gender Continuum in Political Behavior

00:03:14 - but I generally think of it pretty broadly in in any number of areas in political behavior. And there's a, a wonderful article by Bittner and Goodyear grant in 2017 that makes this argument very crystallized, this argument that essentially we have been conflating sex and gender in political behavior. and they put forward some ways to potentially try to measure it without sort of settling on one. but the basic idea on some level is that you are simplifying the world

00:03:48 - and I, we want to think about it more as a continuum, as gender, being able to go on a continuous scale of masculinity and femininity, and also in really kind of a blunt research method sort of way. We wanted to dig down under this base division and see what's really driving, you know, the distinction between men and women when it comes to all kinds of say of questions, whether it's political knowledge, whether it's domestic ambition

00:04:18 - and whether you run for office, whether it's participation, whether it's voting, in an election, which candidate you prefer. we think that there's value to sort of digging below and thinking about gender in a more granular and more nuanced way. It's a fantastic, sort of discussion and fantastic lecture really to sort of think about because there's, just a ton of work where scholars are exploring all the ways that, socialization happens.

Early Socialization and Gender Bias in Political Ambition

00:04:48 - and I think one of the ways that, what I would say to start with is that we know it starts very early. And so there's a lot of research now that shows that the, the difference between men and women as we are socialized is happening across our lifespans and is happening frequently in all kinds of interactions. Whether they're formal interactions and things like school and work, whether it's conversations, whether it's coaches or mentors or friends. That socialization is happening currently for gender

00:05:21 - And so one of the great sort of recent research articles by Bose and our co-authors in 2022 uses a draw political leader test, which is pretty fascinating because it comes from the idea, from STEM fields of asking pe asking children to draw pictures of a scientist and looking at the gender sort of stereotypes around it, will they replicate this? But they do draw a political leader, and it's students who in US schools would be grade one to six and 66% of them draw a male leader

00:05:56 - And so it starts very early. And then when you look at even the candidate stage of where people would actually run for office, there's a lot of research that shows that, that, women need to be encouraged, need to be asked, and are less likely to be asked or told you should run for office someday. One of the most fascinating findings that comes out of, of the large scale research studies over time on this is

Gender Ambition and Self-Perception in Political Office

00:06:27 - who could run for office will rate themselves as less qualified than their male counterparts with the same qualifications, right? So there's already this sort of built in, lower level of ambition and views of qualification that translate into, expressed ambition. I think you're right that you're seeing progress in terms of what you might consider, academic qualification attainment, levels

00:06:56 - to most professors right, about this. but oftentimes it doesn't translate to that next step. And our concern is really about that next step of being politically running for political office. There's some great questions embedded in a as well. so, what we, use to, to measure masculine femininity is drawn from the work of Sandra Bam, a gender psychologist, originally conceived of in the 1970s, so 50 years ago, creating

00:07:30 - by looking at descriptors and traits that would be considered sort of typical or ideal for men and women in society. And so, it has been one answer is sort of, it has been widely, validated, used, over time in different contexts. When you go to a web of science or to a Google scholar, it's been cited over 6,000 times now. There has definitely been critique and pushback on her conception as well.

Revising Gender Measures: The Evolution of the BSRI

00:08:02 - for example, one of the, the, the battery that we use, the BIM sex Rules inventory, we use the Brief Battery, which is an inventory that asks you descriptors about yourself that are masculine and feminine descriptors. And, why, the reason why we use the brief one is that BIM actually revised her original BSRI and cut out some of the items that I think if we looked at today, we would say, this is doesn't age well for, aspects,

00:08:33 - as think more negative items. So for example, if you look at the original BSRI, one of the feminine traits is gullible and another one is childlike. and those traits are not in the revised brief BSRI, which is what we used for this research study. and so it's also the, the, the Instrument that is used in the Monica McDermott book that inspired a lot of our research. I've looked at political ambition in a number

00:09:04 - usually psychological ways I'm interested in how personality shapes it, whether that's your extroversion as a personality type, whether you might have some dark, traits like Machiavellianism. and so what we did was explore nascent ambition. And nascent ambition does, it does merit a a, a mini sort of capsule on it. Nascent ambition is usually studied, in the mass population and not among, elected leaders because the way that it's thought

Exploring Gender Traits and Political Ambition

00:09:36 - So you're sort of developing them over time. And that's really fascinating to us because it means we can study it in broad populations and see like what is determining who thinks about running for political office and who feels they're qualified to run for political office just at a base level. And so what we did is we used the BSRI to measure masculinity and femininity, and then we, we do have the binary measure that we consider for sex, the zero one, and we predict, whether you have thought about running

00:10:09 - to run for political office in our study. And what we find, I think what was sort of surprising about our findings on some level is just how robust and strong they were. that is masculinity in particular is positively related to nascent ambition on both of those, items that I, that I mentioned for both men and women, if you're scoring higher in masculinity, you're more likely to respond that you've thought about running for political office

00:10:41 - And then what we found also is that for femininity, it worked in the opposite direction. You are less likely to have thought about running for political office the higher you score on femininity, for both men and women. And it's sort of notable about the other surprising thing or for interesting thing to think about. One of the things that I think validates using these type of measures is that when you look at the distribution of masculinity and femininity in our sample, what you notice is there's a lot of heterogeneity, like men

Exploring Gender Diversity and Political Ambition

00:11:14 - and as women both have score and high score on femininity and masculinity, there's real diversity to it. And even though men score slightly higher on masculine traits, it is not that much higher. women score high as well. And in femini in feminine traits, women score a little bit higher than men, but there's a lot of diversity underneath that binary measure. And so for us, we found pretty clearly that even with sex in the model, there is added value

00:11:45 - phenomenon. I think it's, it's really interesting because, you know, I view, I don't wanna diminish our research, but I view it sort of as, you know, building on some of this excellent and wonderful gender research by a number of scholars. But the first thing for us was, you know, is there value added in doing this? And because you're looking back at 50 years of research books, articles, chapters about gender DAPs,

00:12:16 - what would happen if you could, if you were measuring masculinity, femininity as well as this? And it's important to note in our research that the sex, that sex, the sexual identity measure, the binary still matters. Women are more, are less likely to have nascent ambition, but it is much lower effect than masculinity is in our, in our estimates. And so the implications are that we hope that scholars will try to find ways to get more granular

Rethinking Gender Measurement in Political Studies

00:12:49 - I mean, a lot of the studies that use the simple binary measure have scholars that understand gender and socialization and you know, they're not like foolish about this. They sort of understand it, but it's difficult to find ways to measure it properly. One of the in things that inhibits it is that it's difficult in most large scale survey projects to have 20 to 40 questions to measure gender when they are used to just doing one. and there have been some scholars that have tried

00:13:20 - on this scale, how masculine are you? How feminine are you? But they don't seem to provide the leverage that something like the BSRI does. Now, in terms of society and broader and future studies and current studies, I mean, I see a, the, that bm, even though it was developed 50 years ago, society has changed and shifted. But I still feel a lot of these things intuitively for me, what my, my guess is, is this, what's happening

00:13:51 - as they've are socialized to be a little more caring and to think of others a little bit more, are gaining more femininity. Women are gaining more of the masculinity, they're becoming more socialized to being leaders, to being aggressive, to being, you know, forceful in their lives. And I think that's excellent. So I would imagine there's been a bit of a, of a merging of these things in a way. And then the other thing that's happening is that gender identity and roles are becoming more fluid and more politicized in the United States

Understanding Gender Dynamics in Political Campaigns

00:14:21 - And most, most democracies, presidential campaigns are in the United States context at least, are using masculine appeals. almost trying to out masculine other candidates. And we need to know what determines who receives those sort of appeals. And maybe it's about the masculinity and femininity that they have in their traits. And we can't measure that if we just use the binary. We also have prominent women running for political office of major

00:14:53 - that could be the first female president leaders around the world, right? And we sort of wanna know what drives this, like, is it, does it have to do partially with the masculine femininity that those individuals have that have helped guide them to be more entered into the political sphere? And so for, for my co-author Carl and myself, we are just sort of pushing for more refined and granular measures to understand the complexity of gender and political behavior today without denying that

00:15:32 - and in politics as well. but that there's something for gendered personality that is an additive value.

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