Tall Man Talking. It is no secret that women are seriously under-represented at all levels of political office-holding in the contemporary United States. It remains the case that women are far less likely than men to run for and win elective political office, a situation that grows still more acute at higher levels of office and, disconcertingly, has shown no clear improvement over the past decade. This gross gender disparity in seeking and holding office--which makes a mockery of women's formal political equality--has serious implications for representation of and responsiveness to women's distinctive issue concerns and, more generally, for the manner in which politics are conducted in this country. The available evidence suggests that women tend to want different things than men from the political process, that women are more engaged by politics when women candidates vie for their support, and that we get a fundamentally different kind of politics--varying in both content and form--the more women hold political office.

How, then, can we increase women's likelihood of running for, and holding political office? To answer this question, we must understand both why women are less inclined than men to seek political office, and (relatedly) why voters are less likely to support female than male candidates. The available evidence already indicates that gender stereotypes about capacities for political leadership are strong and pervasive in both media coverage and the minds of voters, (and presumably also in the calculations of party leaders and potential candidates), and that voters, especially men, are significantly less willing to support female than male candidates. Tall Man Talking is specifically concerned with illuminating those factors that diminish:

(i) women's willingness to seek positions of political leadership,
(ii) women's capacities to exercise effective political leadership, and
(iii) the propensity of others to support and facilitate women seeking, holding and exercising leadership positions.

We already have some evidence that gender stereotypes--in the minds of women themselves, the people with whom they interact, and the people whose support they must ultimately garner--are critically implicated in all three hurdles to women exercising political leadership. For my part, I plan to unpack the processes of socialization taking place for girls and boys, women and men, via the family, schools, peer groups, and the media. In sum, I want to discover what kinds of social learning are producing these gender stereotypes, to determine exactly how those stereotypes undermine women's leadership (e.g. by influencing their own, and/or others perceptions of their leadership abilities, and/or their actual development of those abilities), and most importantly, the specific mechanisms by which they manage to do so. My exploration of gendered political socialization is proceeding in three major stages, as follows.

(1) The first major component of this project explores the impact of gender-stereotypic and counter-stereotypic male and female candidates on the political engagement of women and men. Quite a few scholars before me have examined the determinants of citizens' willingness to vote for male and female candidates of variously described character and quality. In contrast, I wanted to use these candidates, in effect, as explanatory variables, potentially influencing women's and men's political efficacy and engagement. Pursuing my interest in role modeling and gender socialization, I wanted to test the notion that the dearth of viable, positively evaluated female candidates plays a major role in influencing both women's and men's conceptions of women's capacities to participate effectively in politics, and especially, to exercise political leadership.

This notion has been floated previously by other scholars noting that women in senate districts with successful women candidates show significantly higher levels of political knowledge, interest, efficacy and participation. But with mere observational studies it remained impossible to discern the direction of causality, and the possibility remained that this was merely an association: that some common factor in these kinds of districts explained both the greater success of their female candidates and the greater engagement of their female residents. So experimental investigation was clearly required to finally determine whether more, and more successful female candidates might actually have a positive impact on women's political efficacy and engagement (and by implication, whether the dearth of women in politics partly explained women's pervasive feelings of inefficacy in and disengagement from that arena).

This first component of the gender socialization project, then, brings together evidence from two different experiments. These provided stark evidence in support of the notion that the presence of strong female candidates increases the political engagement (especially political knowledge and interest) of women (and somewhat diminishes that of men). Among the most illuminating results was the finding that women's performance on political knowledge tests improved (and men's declined) upon hearing positive evaluations of the female candidates, even though those evaluations provided no actual information bearing on the items making up these general political knowledge tests. This suggests an important mechanism (enhanced self-confidence and self-esteem) by which men are 'socialized in' and women are 'socialized out' of effective participation in the political 'game'.

That such simple manipulations could have such effects upon women's and men's capacities, efficacy and engagement strongly suggests (i) that men enjoy an enormous advantage in politics simply by continually seeing men participating in and succeeding at politics, and (ii) that women's taste for, and involvement in politics, their willingness to think of themselves as leaders, and others' willingness to accept them as such, all could be immediately and dramatically enhanced by the simple presence of more women players--especially counter-stereotypic players ('strong', 'tough', 'knowledgeable')--in the political game. In sum then, the data from these two experiments provide powerful, converging evidence regarding the psychological mechanisms underlying women's enhanced political engagement when confronted with viable female candidates competing for important political offices. And they also indicate the 'background' attributes (personality, socialization, childhood experiences, prior attitudes) that condition men's and women's evaluation and acceptance of these candidates, and their enhanced/diminished political engagement in response to same.

(2) Another important mechanism of gendered political socialization is, of course, the popular media. Through our constant exposure to news coverage, advertising, sitcoms, TV dramas and movies, in particular, we all learn, and have continually reinforced, important 'gender lessons'. These pervasive gender lessons concern the qualities and capacities purportedly possessed by boys and girls, women and men, and what rewards and punishments we can expect to reap from taking on certain roles, making certain choices, and engaging in different kinds of behaviors. This is a very powerful, perhaps the most powerful means of gender socialization, and like all such learning, takes place mostly below the level of conscious awareness. As scholars, too, we have surprisingly little awareness of it, with little or no systematic data collection and analysis having been conducted on the gender lessons actually being conveyed by the popular media.

I set out to rectify this state of affairs by having ten different coders--of varying gender and race, and entirely 'blind' to the hypotheses under investigation--view hundreds of randomly taped segments of network coverage and measure, for each of those segments, more than 300 variables, exhaustively 'describing' the visuals being presented and the 'messages' being conveyed. This large random sample of regular network coverage was subsequently supplemented by identical coding of 40 programs airing during primetime in last year's 'May sweeps', as well as the top ten box office movies in each of the last six years. This data now awaits analysis. As far as I know this is the first data of its kind, systematically observed and quantified. It will be invaluable in uncovering the content of modern gender socialization: in revealing exactly how we are teaching men and women to be men and women, and exactly what we are training them to be and do.

(3) The third, and what I consider the most politically important mode of gender socialization awaits investigation. It was my own experience, and then initial informal observation of this mode of socialization that originally inspired the title for this overarching book project: Tall Man Talking. I am referring to the ways in which audiences respond to female public speakers. This is a 'socialization lesson' conveyed to the speaker by non-verbal body language, below the level of both the speaker's and the audience members' conscious awareness. These 'non-verbal affect cues' include, primarily: frowning, shaking head, crossing arms, and leaning away. These mechanisms are well documented in social psychology, as is the fact that everyone 'feels' the negativity, but neither side realizes it is being generated and conveyed by these non-verbal cues, let alone why. So the audience members assume they are feeling badly because the female speaker is performing badly, and she assumes likewise.

These negative non-verbal feedback cues are pervasive and potentially devastating to women. A good deal of research in psychology suggests that they are generated, automatically and subconsciously, whenever someone violates our norms for their role and status. Clearly, a female public speaker violates our gender norms. And the evidence is that audiences persistently 'punish' and undermine female speakers in response, irrespective of their actual performance. The consequences for our conscious assessments of that woman's, and other women's capacities to speak in public, to exercise effective leadership, cannot be over-stated. The impact on the woman's assessment of her own capacities, by itself, would be enough to turn most women away from any occupation involving public speaking. And this is even if any such attempts had not already been rendered virtually futile by the fact that future electors, by the same process, had been made nearly incapable of seeing her as a leader.

As I have noted, all of these processes are well documented by psychologists. What I want to do is investigate the individual, family and environmental attributes that make girls more or less resistant to such negative feedback; more or less undermined by these non-verbal cues; more or less likely to infer from those cues negative assessments of their own competence; more or less likely to be discouraged from further attempts. In short, if we cannot control the tendency of audiences to undermine girls and women in this manner, I want to know what kinds of girls can resist this devastating 'socialization out' of politics, potentially going on to seek and exercise effective political leadership. A secondary but still very important objective will be, likewise, to identify what kinds of girls and boys, as audience members, might be less likely to convey these negative cues to the speaker, and to draw these inferences about the speaker and themselves.