If the 2008 and 2016 elections taught us nothing else, they taught us that Americans just don’t like Hillary Clinton. She will never hold another elected office in her life, and in retrospect it’s pretty weird that she ever did. Obviously, this is because our society is misogynistic and patriarchal and stuff like that. Evil white men are scared of strong intelligent women, etc.
This conclusion is self-evident, obviously, but some academics decided to prove it anyway. Or at least that’s what they thought they were doing.
After watching the second televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in October 2016 — a battle between the first female candidate nominated by a major party and an opponent who’d just been caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women — Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD, had an idea. Millions had tuned in to watch a man face off against a woman for the first set of co-ed presidential debates in American history. But how would their perceptions change, she wondered, if the genders of the candidates were switched? She pictured an actress playing Trump, replicating his words, gestures, body language, and tone verbatim, while an actor took on Clinton’s role in the same way. What would the experiment reveal about male and female communication styles, and the differing standards by which we unconsciously judge them?
Here’s what that looked and sounded like. In this rehearsal footage, we see a female Donald Trump analogue, “Brenda King,” debating a male Hillary Clinton analogue, “Jonathan Gordon”:
She’s got Trump’s gestures and bluster down pat, and he’s mastered Hillary’s brittleness and condescension. Looks good to me.
And here’s what happened when these very smart people debuted the performance piece, dubbed Her Opponent, to an audience of their fellow academics and then had them fill out surveys about what they had just seen:
Many were shocked to find that they couldn’t seem to find in Jonathan Gordon what they had admired in Hillary Clinton — or that Brenda King’s clever tactics seemed to shine in moments where they’d remembered Donald Trump flailing or lashing out. For those Clinton voters trying to make sense of the loss, it was by turns bewildering and instructive, raising as many questions about gender performance and effects of sexism as it answered.
They ended up liking “Brenda” a lot more than “Jonathan.” And it really made them upset. “Now I understand how this happened,” they said.
What does all this mean? For one thing, it means that academics have way too much free time. But it might also mean that they’re the ones who are biased against people because of gender, not the rest of us. In any dispute between a woman and a man, perhaps some people just instinctively side with the woman, regardless of merit, because that’s how they’ve been trained.
But probably not, right? After all, that would mean they’d need to question their own preconceptions and do some self-examination about how they see the world. And the last place that’s ever going to happen is academia.
For what it’s worth, I still don’t like any of ’em. Donald, Hillary, Brenda, Jonathan… they all stink!
