Women Candidates Face Implicit Bias Hurdle

女性候选人面临的隐性偏见

Volunteers taking an "implicit bias" test who were unlikely to associate images of women with leadership titles like executive or president were far less likely to vote for a woman in a race against a man of equal qualification.  

志愿者们参与了一个“内隐偏见”测试。他们在测试中不太可能将女性的形象与执行官或总统等领导者的头衔联系起来。当有实力相当的男性候选人时，他们基本不会选择投票给女性。

撰文 伊莱卡·巴拉斯（Erika Beras）

翻译 M

审核 邰伦玥

“In general, even those who purport to have very egalitarian view or even feminist views of the world, when they were taking this test, it’s called the Implicit Association Test…people are struggling to really associate women with leadership words.”

“总的来说，即使是那些声称自己主张性别平等的人，或甚至持女性主义观点的人，当他们参与到内隐联想测试，他们还是难以将女性与领导者的形象实际联系起来。”

Political scientist Cecilia Hyunjung Mo of Vanderbilt University. She measured what’s known as the implicit bias of some 400 study participants. When they saw an image of a man, the subjects were more likely to pair that picture with words like “president” and “executive.” But when they saw a female, they chose words like “assistant” and “aide.”

来自范德堡大学的政治学家赛西利亚?贤贞?莫分析了400个参与者的内隐联想测试结果。当他们看到男性的照片时，他们更倾向于将那张照片与“总统”或“执行官”配对起来。然而，当他们看到女性的照片时，他们会选择 “助手”或“副官”这类的词。

Mo then asked the volunteers how they would vote in two-person races. Those who were least likely to associate images of women with words associated with leadership “often chose the male candidate over the female candidate when I intentionally set it up so that the two candidates were equally qualified…and sometimes I made the women slightly more qualified. The association was a little weaker so that that qualification did help her, but not as much as I would have hoped. And if I made the male candidate slightly more qualified then he sort of overwhelmed people’s preferences. They were actually explicitly saying, yes, I’m happy to have a female president but simultaneously they were struggling on this test to really see a woman as a leader and that was translating to candidate preferences.”

紧接着，莫询问志愿者会在这两者的竞争中如何选择。对于那些不太会将女性与具有领袖意味的词语联系起来的人，“即使我故意说明两个候选人不相伯仲，甚至有时我会强调女性候选人能力更强，但他们还是更多地选择男性候选人。若这种联想作用较弱，那么实力的确会帮助到女性候选人——但没有到达我所希望的程度。而如果我将男性候选人的能力优于女性，那么女性候选人将面临一边倒的形势。他们确实很清楚地说过，‘是啊，我们想要女性总统。’但与此同时，他们在这个测试中很难将女性视为领导者，而这种偏好刚好转化到候选人选择上。”

The research is in the journal Political Behavior. [Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, The Consequences of Explicit and Implicit Gender Attitudes and Candidate Quality in the Calculations of Voters]

这项研究发表在《政治行为》上。

“This study at least starts showing that on average when you don’t have a lot of information about policy you actually need to have a female candidate that is so obviously more qualified than the male candidate that she can overcome that hurdle…people can learn, but that’s not going to happen if people don’t actually run. If women don’t put themselves out there then there is not going to be an example of what a woman leader can look like. And it’s those examples that need to be created so that people become much more comfortable with what a leader looks like.”

“这项研究至少说明：普遍地，当不知道大量的政治资讯时，人们确实需要一个显而易见地更为有资格的女性候选人来跨越性别的隐性偏见。人们最终会明白这些。然而，如果人们不去确实地行动，这些都将不会发生。若女性不能走上竞选的舞台，那么我们将不会看到女性作为领导者的实例。只有创造出女性领导人的实例，才能让人们适应女性领导人的形象。”