Women of Color’s Descriptive Representation

Abstract Chapter 4 focuses more specifically on the distinct impact of women of color’s descriptive representation in political institutions. Women’s representation, more generally, has the power to undo the masculine stereotypes of political office, but it is women of color that are uniquely positioned, due to their intersectional identities, to undo both the raced and gendered perceptions of political institutions. White women’s increased descriptive representation on its own cannot shift the raced nature of political institutions. This chapter develops a framework identifying how women of color uniquely transform and undo the raced-gendered perceptions of political institutions, and tests this framework with a series of survey experiments. This chapter includes the results of a series of experiments that oversample non-white participants to track how the presence of women of color affects the gendered and racialized traits associated with political institutions. The chapter develops unique stereotyping measures that measure both the gendered and racialized perceptions of political institutions through measures of trait and issue associations, but also beliefs about group representation. These experiments show that majority-women of color institutions are seen as far more feminine than masculine, and more feminine than majority-women institutions. This perceptual shift is particularly strong among voters of color. This chapter shows that women of color shift the institutional stereotypes in politics in distinct ways.