By Zach Wiegel
With countless women’s marches springing up across the nation on Jan. 21 in protest of President Trump’s inauguration, it raises the question: Why is there such a disconnect between Trump and women? Seemingly, one would suspect that Trump’s brash personality and derogatory comments are the source of this pervasive rift; however, the data-driven website FiveThirtyEight.com recently released an article proposing that perhaps implicit gender bias contributed to Trump’s electoral victory.
In laypersons’ terms, an implicit bias is a stereotype that a person may unconsciously have. When it comes to matters of gender, an implicit bias would manifest as a subtle prejudice attaching different associations to a gender. For example, the tendency to think of women as the homemakers and men as the breadwinners would represent an implicit gender bias. Thus, in this instance, the implicit gender bias is rooted in years of patriarchal tradition to generalize differences between men and women.
Now interject the role of implicit gender bias into the 2016 presidential election, and intuitively you might suspect that this bias favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton because people might have been inclined to unconsciously associate Trump (a male) as possessing more presidential qualities than Clinton (a female). So given that we know implicit biases are real, it’s logical to surmise that Clinton may in fact have lost the election because of this implicit gender bias.
As Trump’s surprising win demonstrated, things aren’t always as they seem. With this in mind, it is also possible that implicit gender bias did not have a large enough effect to sway the election in Trump’s favor. I’m not claiming that implicit gender bias isn’t real, but I am asserting that it’s not correct to scapegoat it as the ultimate reason that Trump won.
Deciding for whom to vote is often a tough decision that requires much thought; however, the theory that Trump’s victory was due to an implicit gender bias is rather simplistic because it assumes that people don’t act rationally when casting their ballots. Implicit biases are subconscious; that’s why they are called implicit — we are often unaware that they even exist. Research reveals that implicit biases affect our decision-making most when we are short on time. In situations in which we don’t have time to think, we rely on our instincts or our gut to guide us. But when we do have time to think something over, we use a more rational process in which we think through our decisions.
Therefore, with the excessively long nature of our political process, there are many months for a person to decide for whom to vote, indicating that people possess the capacity to override potential implicit biases. Moreover, Sen. Barack Obama was elected president despite an implicit racial bias favoring whites over blacks.
Implicit biases are real. The effect they may have had on the 2016 election could very well be overblown because people are able to overcome their implicit biases when they have time to think through their decisions. There is no denying that implicit gender bias may have affected the decision-making of some voters, but at the aggregate level, we shouldn’t presume that it is the reason Trump won. There are many reasons Trump won and a possible latent gender bias may not be the coup de grace that can explain it all.