The surprising reason that Kamala Harris might face a different kind of sexism than Hilary Clinton

In a survey in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, around 40% of Americans said that society would be better off if women “stick to the jobs and tasks that they are naturally suited for.”

Even among people who would call that attitude sexist, Clinton routinely faced the same type of criticisms that female leaders often get in business—that they’re too loud, too aggressive, too pushy. In debates, she was called “hyper aggressive” or “angry” or “shrill.” Her male opponents weren’t described the same way even when they were equally intense or yelling. The more she violated traditional gender norms by being assertive or competitive, the more voters tended to call her unlikable.

“The more female politicians are seen as striving for power, the less they’re trusted and the more moral outrage gets directed at them,” Terri Vescio, a Penn State professor who studies gender bias, told PBS at the time. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you’re perceived as competent, you’re not perceived as warm. But if you’re liked and trusted, you’re not seen as competent.”

Eight years later, it’s possible that Americans are a little less sexist. (The U.S. lags far behind other countries in electing female leaders; the U.K. has already had three female prime ministers, for example.) But Kamala Harris might also be viewed more positively for a surprising reason: her race.

A study from 2012 suggests that Black women are judged differently than white women when it comes to the “agency penalty”—the fact that female leaders are often punished for displaying dominance.

The study gave participants a fictional scenario where a vice president at a Fortune 500 company gave feedback to a subordinate who wasn’t performing well. The scenarios each showed photos of the fake execs—they were either male or female, and white or Black. (None of the study participants were Black.) The executives were either dominant—saying things like “I demand you take steps to improve”—or gentle, saying things like “I encourage you” and “I’m a caring, committed boss.”

The results showed clear bias: white women and Black men were both seen less favorably if they had a dominant style. But Black women were perceived similarly to white men.

Prior to the study, other research about the “agency penalty” hadn’t considered the effect of race. The researchers theorized that Black women might face double jeopardy since they have the twin stigmas of being both female and Black. That wasn’t the case.

“If you combine two stigmatized social identities—that is, female and Black—the result is not double the disadvantage of either of the stigmatized identities alone,” Robert Livingston, a business professor who led the study and now teaches at Harvard, said at the time. “In fact there is a sort of canceling-out effect. In mathematics, two negatives multiplied result in a positive, but this is an unexpected result when you talk about stigmatized identities.”

Since then, additional research has shown that there are also differences in stereotypes of women based on race. Dominant behavior is in conflict with expectations that people have of women to be nurturing, “but that research is based on 50 years of work on mostly white women,” says Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, a professor of leadership at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and one of the coauthors of the first study. Rosette, who is Black, focuses much of her research on the intersection of gender, race, and leadership. “According to our subsequent work, even though communal, nurturing behavior is also prescribed to women of color, it’s not prescribed to the same extent as it for white women. For Asian women, the predominant stereotype is competence. For Black women, the predominant stereotype is dominance.”

Of course, this does not imply that life is easier for Kamala Harris, who is both Black and Asian American, or other Black women. Harris still clearly faces both sexism and racism. (That includes claims that she’s a “DEI candidate,” which overlooks her record as a prosecutor, attorney general, senator, and vice president.) But on this one specific aspect of leadership—how assertive she can be when she expresses herself—she might be judged a little differently than Clinton.

“If we were to extrapolate our research to Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, it may suggest that Harris might have more behavioral freedom in terms of a dominant leadership style than Hillary Clinton did,” says Rosette. “However, this is speculative, as it’s complicated not just by their leader roles, but an occupation that hasn’t been studied before in this context: presidential leadership.” And though Harris might have more leeway in her display of dominance, she says, “there are numerous other areas in which she may be constrained or may not get the benefit of the doubt.”