Principle Penalty: Examining Challenges Faced by Women Advocating for Principles

• In Event: Women as Politicians

Abstract

Biases against women in leadership positions are pervasive. In this paper, we investigate whether such biases interact with the kind of position for which women leaders advocate as well as how such biases can be countered. Political conflicts often involve a choice between actions that are framed as right on principle (deontological reasoning) and actions that are framed as preferable in terms of outcomes (consequentialist reasoning). Examples include debates about whether the rights of prisoners should be violated, and civil liberties be cut in the name of national security and whether populist leaders should be able to sidestep political norms to implement policies that a majority is said to support. We document a bias against women who engage in deontological as opposed to consequentialist reasoning. To do so, we leverage a German theater play called TERROR which dramatizes a fictional trial of a military pilot who shot down a hijacked passenger plane, thereby killing everyone onboard, but potentially saving the lives of spectators in a stadium to which the terrorists steered the plane. The prosecution argues the pilot should be convicted of murder because his actions violate the constitutional principle of human dignity, while the defense wants the pilot to go free. As part of the play, audiences vote for or against conviction. We combine data on the gender composition of casts and audience votes from more than 1,000 performances throughout Germany with a survey experiment with 5,760 Germans who were exposed to recordings of the closing statements of the prosecution and defense recorded by male and female voice actors. Our results show that conviction rates are lowest if a women prosecutor opposes a male defense attorney. This pattern suggests a bias against women who argue based on principle. We also show that this bias decreases, if respondents are incentivized to pay close attention to the content of the arguments made by both parties. These results suggest gender biases may play a role in democratic backsliding where populist leaders are opposed by women candidates who argue in favor of the constitution. Our findings also have implications for the design of political events such as presidential debates.

Author

• Anna Maria Wilke, New York University