How emerging adults use stereotypes to discuss political leaders in naturalistic conversations

Men tend to be stereotyped as high competence-low warmth, whereas women tend to be stereotyped as high warmth-low competence. As competence is an important trait for political candidates, women politicians must portray themselves as having a balance of warmth and competence. To counter the stereotype that they lack competence, women must strategically highlight evidence of competence through their use of language and their interactions with others. However, if women politicians fail to portray themselves as sufficiently warm, they may also receive negative evaluations because such behavior is incongruent with gender stereotypes. Thus, women politicians must meet both gender-related (warm) and role-related (competent) expectations to maintain their position as leaders. Here, we examine whether stereotypes about women politicians and the association between competence and politics hold in everyday social interactions among young adults (18–31). We use data from a round-robin social interaction study ( n = 259) conducted between April and October 2023 at a Canadian university. Using the transcripts from this study, we examine the gendered aspects of language construction by assessing the use of warmth- and competence-related language and communion- and agency-related language during political conversations. We also examine how interacting with same- or different-gender social partners relate to patterns of language usage when discussing leadership. Finally, we report a thematic analysis on individual interactions to the topic prompts, “What do you think about women in government?” and “Describe your ideal politician” to qualitatively explore these linguistic themes and how language changes when discussing women vs. men politicians. While we did not ask directly about gender stereotypes or other kinds of barriers to women's political participation in our study, this language frequently emerged in the conversations, suggesting how pervasive these views can be among a sample of young adults. Stereotypes can impact leadership evaluations, electoral success, and women's political ambition to even consider running for office. Understanding the language around ideal leadership and women leaders can help us consider the kinds of implicit obstacles diverse candidates may face to their full democratic participation. Our results highlight the importance of examining stereotypes using real-world interactions and the novelty of face-of-face naturalistic conversation data.