Events

The mega-election year of 2024 featured 31 direct presidential elections, with women winning just five contests—and only in two instances where the president is the sole or more powerful chief executive. This pattern persists even as public opinion shows increasing voter support for women leaders. Yet does this support persist once women express presidential ambition?

In the US case, defeated presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris received high approval ratings while serving in Congress, yet faced relentless criticism when seeking the presidency. Both were called “too ambitious.” We use survey experiments to explore the existence of a presidential ambition penalty for white and non-white women. Contrary to our supposition that women and non-white women face an ambition penalty relative to white men, we do not find an across-the-board penalty for ambitious women. Rather, where the ambition penalty exists, it is applied by men and hostile sexists. Our findings suggest that media narratives emphasizing women candidates’ ‘over-ambition’ reflect the continued dominance of men’s perspectives in US public discourse.

The Political Science Seminar Series is convened by Rachel Bernhard and Tarik Abou-Chadi. For more information on this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact politics.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.