The folks over at FiveThirtyEight got together last week to ponder the question, “Do You Have To Be Manly To Be President?” And while they did not appear to reach a definitive conclusion, the discussion was very interesting for a couple of reasons (as in how significant is the size of a man’s hands in determining his ability to occupy the Oval Office).
From Clare Malone, a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight:
We’ve all been conditioned in certain ways — and even if you’re down with feminism and up on the correct way to address changing gender norms, if you were born in a certain year (let’s say pre-1995), you have some pretty ingrained bias you might never get rid of. Those Snapchatting younger millennials, now, they might be a different story when it comes to perceptions of candidates in elections to come over the next decades.
It is simply assumed that millennials will not have the ingrained bias that is shared by older generations. That was my assumption as well. The conditioning of my youth is different from what they were exposed to, so their bias should be different as well.
But it really doesn’t appear to be working out that way. At least, not completely.