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The record crop of female candidates seemed to be the big story of 2020, but at first they struggled to get any attention at all. Instead we were treated to glowing profiles of young male upstarts like former Texas representative Beto O’Rourke, whose campaign debuted in Vanity Fair, and South Bend’s ex-mayor Pete Buttigieg, an early media darling of Vogue. In March of last year, media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Washington Post about the “potentially dangerous” ways media coverage of the “B-boys”—Beto, Biden, and Bernie—was eclipsing that of the four talented female senators in the race. (By the way, most women I’ve talked to agree that the most definitive proof of sexism in the 2020 race is the continued prominence of Buttigieg, a 38-year-old former small-city mayor, who unites us in the angry belief that no woman could get this far with a résumé so flimsy.)
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For her part, Warren, the most popular female candidate, has faced a kaleidoscope of sexist slurs and jabs since announcing her candidacy nearly a year ago. 2019 began with some pundits and activists mocking her drinking a beer in an Instagram livestream; 2020 began with some of the same folks mocking her dancing onstage in Brooklyn with former housing and urban development secretary Julián Castro the night after he endorsed her. His endorsement should have been the focus of Warren’s news coverage that night, but it wasn’t. Let’s hope “But she danced” doesn’t become shorthand for sexist media myopia in 2020 the way “But her e-mails” did in 2016.

Warren has had major highs and lows, some of her own making. In early 2019 she was unfairly written off as another version of Clinton, “elitist” and not particularly “likable,” and continued to be hurt by her decision to use (legally meaningless) DNA test results to “prove” her claim to an infinitesimal genetic Native American ancestry. But as she got deeper into her campaign, her warm, one-on-one retail politics strategy, with the endless selfie lines and the pinkie swears promising little girls they can grow up to become president, combined with her bold ideas—a wealth tax, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free public college—and her myriad detailed plans for them made her a front-runner by the fall. She racked up a series of endorsements from a diverse list of grassroots groups and activists, including the Working Families Party, Black Womxn For, and Medicare for All activist Ady Barkan, as well as positive headlines in mainstream and progressive news outlets. By early October, she was basically tied with Biden for the national lead, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, and placing high in the early primary states too, as Sanders slipped a bit and Harris lost her post-June-debate bump. But Warren began to fall almost immediately.
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But all of the female candidates have been undermined by double standards. When I talk to other women about sexism in the 2020 race, the complaints fall into two categories. First, female candidates get hurt by going on the attack, while men generally don’t. Second, women get dogged to provide more details about their policy plans—and then get criticized for those details.
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Another circle of hell: To be seen as credentialed, women often have to produce more-detailed policy proposals than men, whose legitimacy are generally presumed. “We expect more of women in order to be credentialed,” Reynolds notes. “They can’t get away with broad policy strokes. They need policy details. But then the details are where they get in trouble.”
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