May 21, 2015
Think about how this might apply to Hillary Clinton, long seen as competent but not warm—hence her famous “likability” deficit. Of course, there are reasons unrelated to gender why this might be: many voters question her truthfulness about incidents ranging from Whitewater to the fiasco involving her State Department e-mails. (It is worth pausing to note that female politicians aren’t by definition more virtuous than male ones, and that aging doesn’t necessarily change a person’s character for better or worse. Indeed, one could argue that, in an odd sense, women will have truly arrived when grandmotherly politicians reveal themselves to be just as scandal-prone as older men are.)