Introduction
female-typed behaviors, incongruity, male-typed behaviors
Women have less influence than men in a variety of decision-making settings such as businessIn this article, we ask: What causes women’s lower influence in discussions about politics, and how might it be improved? Previous research indicates gender gaps emerge in social contexts where people already have expectations of gender norms for a particular domainStudies that explain the gender gap in political influence as the result of differential treatment of men and women speakers emphasize the role of stereotypes—often independent of differences in the actual behavior of men and womenGender performance—or the practices and habits of femininity and masculinity that women and men use to communicate gender—may also contribute to women’s lower influence, because male-typed behaviors are more highly valued in some settings than female-typed behaviors. Studies of gender performance emphasize differences in word choice, tone, or behaviorsWhile these are not competing explanations, the majority of the research just described attempts to isolate and evaluate a single explanatory theory, often using research designs that hold core features of the other theory constant. This leads to an incomplete understanding of the complexity of gender dynamics in interpersonal interactions—particularly in online spaces that allow people greater freedom to control gendered cues in their self-presentation—and the promotion of solutions based on changing other actors’ gender biasesIn this experiment, we randomly paired two people who identified as Democrats to have an online, text-based conversation about the 2020 Presidential Primary Election in the United States. In the control condition, a woman and a man had a conversation together, and each participant was represented by a gendered avatar that was visible only to their conversation partner. In some treatment conversations, we manipulated gender perceptions by randomly varying whether these avatars were consistent or inconsistent with the partner’s self-reported gender identity. In another set of conversations, we paired respondents with a conversation partner of their same gender with a correctly-gendered avatar. This design allows us to examine how perceptions of gender interact with gender performance as both unfold over the course of a conversation.In particular, if women who are mislabeled as men gain relative influence in the conversation, this would be evidence that gendered expectations are a main cause of women’s lower influence in interpersonal settings. Under this explanation, we would also expect little difference in the gendered content of the language used by men and women. By contrast, if women who are mislabeled as men experience no change in their relative influence compared to women who are not mislabeled, this would be evidence that sexism in the response to how women perform their gender is a primary cause of women’s lower influence. This theory also predicts identifiable and relatively static differences in the gendered language used by men and women, regardless of the avatar assigned. However, if both explanations are simultaneously occurring, then role incongruity might lead to a decrease in influence for both men and women when their gender is misrepresented