The Gendered (Political) Pictures in Our Minds

Abstract Chapter 2 explains what it means to have white-masculine institutions, and how our political institutions came to have this association. This chapter draws on multiple strands of research to identify how and why individuals apply gender stereotypic qualities to objects and institutions in ways that are not dissimilar from how people apply stereotypes to individual women and men. The theory of institutional stereotype change advanced in this book argues that increases in citizen-level political engagement and improvements in the evaluations people form of political institutions will occur only when women’s descriptive representation decreases the masculine stereotypes and increases the feminine stereotypes associated with political institutions. If women’s descriptive representation is going to increase political participation, then women’s descriptive representation should change the stereotypes associated with political institutions. This perceptual shift is pivotal for experiencing any of the downstream benefits accrued from increasing women’s descriptive representation. This chapter reports the results of an original test of the gendered associations people hold of various political offices to test the assumption that people see political institutions as masculine. Subsequent chapters argue and show how these associations are not immutable. This chapter elaborates my main theory of institutional stereotype change which argues that as the visible demographic characteristics of a political institution change so that one group moves from being a minority in the institution to being more visible, the gendered and racialized stereotypes of the institution will also change.