The parenthood premium? A candidate evaluation study on warmth, competence, and parenthood status.

Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of Canadian government, despite women candidates often being better qualified than men candidates. One explanation for this is the persistence of gender stereotypes, especially those that associate politics with men and competence. Extant work finds an aggregate bias in favour of men candidates precisely because voters tend to value competence-related traits as more important than warmth-related ones in candidate evaluation. As women tend to be associated with warmth, and men with competence, women candidates are often put in a difficult position of having to balance stereotype-incongruence, (i.e., being a competent woman), with being role-congruence, (i.e., being a woman politician). Thus, voters may have ambiguous expectations for women candidates, especially mother candidates who are perceived as especially warm. The question I aim to address in this paper is, “How do parenthood, warmth and competence, shape candidate evaluation?” I conduct an online survey experiment with a sample of 500 Canadian mothers, 500 Canadian fathers, and 500 non-parent Canadians to look at how individuals evaluate candidates based on the candidates’ warmth, competence, gender, and parenthood status. In Study 1, I present participants with randomized side-by-side image comparisons of fictitious women candidate campaign ads who vary in parenthood, warmth, and competence messaging and ask participants to respond to a series of questions relating to vote choice, perceived warmth, competence, party affiliation of the candidate. In Study 2, I introduce a man candidate who similarly varies in warmth, competence, and parenthood messaging and ask participants to rate all candidates on a series of standard leadership traits (i.e. honest, intelligent, etc.). Finally, I ask an open-ended question, “Do you think being a parent is important for politicians?” This research aims to shed light on the conditions in which parenthood status adds a premium to political candidates and when it hinders them, and whether this is different for men and women candidates.