Given the Olympics are up and running, it’s fitting to reflect on how the image that cartoonists most often use to show that women and ethnic minorities have a disadvantage is one of the hurdles.
The illustrations recur: Of women and people of colour literally having to jump over more and higher hurdles than white people or men to reach victory in their fields, particularly politics.
Now that U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, whose mother was born in India and father in Jamaica, is the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, media outlets are especially filled with talk about gender and racial barriers.
But the clichéd metaphor of an unfair hurdles race is in need of an update in light of studies showing that in almost all cases and places women and people of colour compete evenly.
Last month, researchers at the University of Oxford unveiled the findings of the most extensive analysis yet performed on how people vote in view of candidates’ ethnicity and gender.
Lead by Sanne van Oosten, the team looked for the patterns in 43 different sociological experiments in the U.S., Europe and Canada of voter preference over the 10-year period ending in 2022.
The experiments typically involved presenting respondents with profiles of fictional political candidates, while randomly varying the candidates’ race or ethnicity. There were in total more than 310,000 observations of respondents’ preferences.
“Our meta-analysis concludes that, on average, voters do not discriminate against minoritized politicians,” van Oosten said. “In fact, women and Asians have a significant advantage compared to male and white candidates.”
Van Oosten, who had earlier been appalled by gender-based criticism of Hillary Clinton and the race-based undermining of Barack Obama, considers the results good news — for Harris and other candidates who are female and/or of colour.
The researcher has been surprised by the dearth of media interest, however, given that her earlier study of how the public can stereotype Muslim candidates as homophobic received international coverage.
“One journalist at a very highly esteemed newspaper even literally said to me: ‘People aren’t interested in good news’,” van Oosten said on social media.
The study by van Oosten, Liza Mügge and Daphne van der Pas doesn’t deny that there is a small minority of voters who have racist or sexist attitudes. But it does find most voters aren’t negatively impacted by a candidate being female or a person of colour. Indeed, it’s often perceived as a positive.
Here how the authors put it in their meta-analysis:
• “Voters do not assess racial/ethnic minority candidates differently than their majority (white) counterparts.”
• In regard to Asian candidates in the U.S.: “Voters assess them slightly more positively than majority (white) candidates.”
• “A meta-analysis on gender demonstrates that voters assess women candidates more positively than men candidates.”
• When voters from minority ethnic groups share the same ethnicity as the candidate, they positively “assess them 7.9 percentage points higher” than white candidates.
• Even in “patriarchal” societies, such as in Jordan, men will vote for a female candidate over a male if she shares the voter’s ethnicity.
The comprehensive Oxford study also cites the work of Anthony Kevins, of Utrecht University, who found across the U.S., Britain and Canada there is no sign that voters will refrain from marking an X on a ballot for a candidate because of their gender or ethnic background.
In Canada, Kevins found only one distinct bias: That members of the Canadian political left have, all other things being equal, “a higher likelihood of voting for the East Asian candidate.”
The University of Toronto’s Randy Besco, author of Identities And Interests: Race, Ethnicity and Affinity Voting, said in an interview that on average racial minority candidates don’t get fewer votes in Canada.
However, in one specific category, “racial minorities running for the Conservative Party do get less votes.”
The broader finding in the work of Besco and others is about significant so-called “affinity voting,” in which people elect members of their same identity group.
“Chinese and South Asians showed preference for their own ethnic group compared to a white candidate,” Besco said. And they also preferred to vote for members of other minority groups over white candidates. “But this preference was weaker than same-ethnic preference.”
Asked whether Canadians who are white also engage in affinity politics, by tending to mark their ballots for Canadians who are white, van Oosten said in an interview there is no indication white majorities in Britain and Canada make a point of voting for their ethnic in-group. But in the U.S., she said there is an inclination for some white people to do that.
In regard to Canadian voting trends around gender, Besco pointed to the work of his colleague, Semra Sevi of L’Université de Montréal, whose team wrote a paper titled, Do Women Get Less Votes? No.
Sevi et al studied the gender breakdown of over 21,000 candidates in all Canadian federal elections since 1921, when women first ran for seats in Parliament.
The researchers determined, in the 1920s, women were at a 2.5 percentage point disadvantage to men.
But in recent decades, Canadian voters have shown no anti-female bias.
What then explains the disparities on gender and ethnicity among MPs in the House of Commons?
In 2023, about 31 per cent of MPs were female, even though women make up half the Canadian population. Jerome Black and Andrew Griffith also wrote in Public Policy that MPs of colour comprised about 16 per cent of House of Commons members in 2021, while visible minorities made up about 20 per cent of all citizens.
Virtually all the researchers cited in this article maintain that such variance, in Canada and around the world, is not the result of voters being prejudiced against women or members of ethnic minorities.
It’s more about who decides to test the political waters.
The researchers strongly suggest the widespread incorrect belief that voters are prejudiced contributes to fewer minority and female candidates putting their names forward, or being supported, at the nomination stage.
As van Oosten puts it, “the demand” is definitely there for women and people of colour in office. But “the supply” often isn’t, she says, in large part because of misplaced fears about racist and sexist attitudes among the electorate.
In other words, as a society we need to stop discouraging women and people of colour from running for politics — and we can start by throwing away outdated images meant to show they have to jump over extra hurdles.
Multicultural Meanderings 