Roundtable Participant - Jennifer Piscopo

Jennifer M. Piscopo is Professor of Gender and Politics at Royal Holloway University of London. Her work on gender, women, and elections has contributed substantively to understanding how party bias shapes the entrance and success of women candidates. Yet her published academic and policy work on perceptions of women’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests the anti-woman bias may be shifting. Her recent survey experiments attempting to gauge voters’ support for men versus women leaders in the context of the climate crisis in fact reveal a persist pro-woman bias. This pro-woman bias holds even when the climate crisis is framed in terms of economics and security—policy areas typically associated with male traits and thus usually thought to elicit preferences for men leaders. In another set of survey experiments related to detecting an ambition penalty among women candidates, she uncovers—counter to expectations—an ambition reward that accrues to women of colour candidates, especially among voters on the left. To unpack these changing dynamics, she recently co-edited (with Diana O’Brien) the 2023 Gender & Politics symposium on ‘Gender and Political Representation in Times of Crisis’.