Hillary Clinton’s fondness of pantsuits has become iconic throughout the media with major news outlets frequently reporting on the former first-lady’s wardrobe collection, but at the end of the day it didn’t have any impact on the voters according to a new study in The Washington Post.
The study, which was conducted by associate professors Danny Hayes of George Washington University and Jennifer Lawless of Americaevealuerepos
“We show that voters don’t hold women and men to different standards on the campaign trail,” the study reports.
To conclude such results, Hayes and Lawless created two hypothetical congressional candidates and wrote eight versions of news stories about the candidate’s support for an education bill. The only variances within the eight stories were the sex of the candidate and either a brief neutral, negative or positive description of the attire he or she wore.
“After reading the article, respondents were asked to rate – on a scale from 0 to 10 – how favorably they viewed the candidate, and evaluate the candidate in terms of professionalism, leadership, competence, empathy, and other traits,” Hayes and Lawless wrote in the Post.
When the fake candidates of each gender were described similarly in the articles concerning appearance, their favorability ratings were nearly identical.
Thus, paying heed to the study, Clinton’s technicolor pantsuits should garner her no more negative attention than Obama’s ‘dad jeans.’
Maybe her Project Runway spin-off proposal not-so-cleverly titled ‘Project Pantsuit’ will give her a boost in the 2016 presidential polls after all.
