Some Context for the CNN Controversy on Women, Hormones and Voting
Some Context for the CNN Controversy on Women, Hormones and Voting -
CNN, which has suffered more than its share of missteps of late, has been widely ridiculed this week for posting, and then quickly taking down, a story about some new research regarding how hormonal changes affect women’s behavior in the voting booth.
The concept was immediately decried as sexist, which is an understandable knee-jerk reaction—until you realize that the person who wrote the article, and the researcher who wrote the paper, are both women.
The yet-to-be-published paper is by Kristina Durante, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Earlier this year, I reported on two of her previous papers (after they were vetted and published by a reputable journal): one on how a scarcity of men impacts women’s career choices, and a second on the unfortunate tendency of some women to “attribute attractive qualities to sexually desirable men” around the time of ovulation.
The paper CNN described similarly focused on behavior and ovulation, but it did so in the far more delicate arena of voting. So as to not be accused of bias, let me just quote the abstract directly: