Among the most disturbing aspects of the recent Presidential election was the frequency and hostility of the attacks on Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. Gender stereotypes and the biases that flow from them are pervasive in our society. But prior to this campaign, most business leaders, diversity officers, and mainstream commentators would have said that women are discriminated against in their pursuit of career advancement because of unconscious gender stereotypes and biases — reflexive, automatic, and unintentional assumptions about women’s and men’s relative capacities for leadership and their appropriate roles in society. These people would also have said, however, that open, blatant, aggressive sexism is now so socially unacceptable that it does not pose a serious threat to women’s successful pursuit of gender parity. Donald Trump’s campaign has put the lie to that latter view.

Trump’s Sexism

Trump seems to glory in his own misogyny. As shock DJ Howard Stern put it, Trump has “always talked in a misogynistic, sexist kind of way … proudly and out in the open. Trump’s comments about women reflect exactly ‘Who Trump is.’” Nevertheless, even someone familiar with Trump’s past comments about women might not have been prepared for the aggressive, blatantly sexist attacks he launched against Clinton.

Trump’s Attacks on Clinton

Trump called Clinton “a nasty woman” and “lying [and] crooked”; he wrote on his website, “To defeat crime and radical Islamic terrorism in our country, to win trade in our country, you need tremendous physical and mental strength and stamina. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have that strength and stamina. She cannot win for you”; and he has unashamedly asserted:

• “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going on is the woman’s card.”
• “The beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”
• “I haven’t quite recovered, it’s early in the morning, from her shouting that message.”
• “Hillary Clinton should not be given national security briefings in that she is a lose [sic] cannon with extraordinarily bad judgment & insticts [sic].”
• “I just don’t think she has a presidential look. And you need a presidential look … to get the job done.”
• “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”

Trump was using common gender stereotypes in all of these attacks: women are not strong enough to lead; women don’t have the look to lead; men know women can’t lead; women don’t work well with other women; women “shout” at men; women are emotional – loose cannons – and irrational – bad judgment and instincts; and men have affairs because their wives are inadequate.

There is nothing new about any of these stereotypes, but by using them as though they represented reality, Trump gave them renewed credibility, permission for others to espouse them without embarrassment, and encouragement to his most rabid supporters to use them in even more vulgar ways: “Trump That Bitch,” and “Trump 2016: Finally Someone With Balls” being just two of the milder.

Trump’s Appeal

The most significant — and ominous — consequence of Trump’s sexist attack on Clinton is that it did not dissuade white voters from supporting him. Indeed, 58 percent of white voters voted for Trump (only one point less than voted for Romney in 2012). Why didn’t white voters find Trump’s misogynistic comments sufficiently offensive to drop their support?

Peter Beinart, writing in The Atlantic, attributes white support for Trump to “precarious manhood,” men’s fear of “emasculation” as a result of “subordination to women.” Jill Filipovic, writing in the New York Times, sees Trump’s white support deriving from his creation of “a fantasy of masculine power reclaimed.” And Joan Williams, writing in the Harvard Business Review, argues that Trump’s white support was the result of a desire to reclaim “manly dignity.” Such dignity “is a big deal for working class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises … a return to an early era, when men were men and women knew their place.”

All three commentators offer valuable insights as to why Trump’s vulgar, hurtful, prejudiced rhetoric did not disturb white men enough to desert Trump and vote for Clinton. The exit polls make very clear that white working class men believe there is an increasing trend away from white male dominance – because of feminism, women’s media presence, and Clinton’s candidacy – and this is simply intolerable for many of them. But Trump’s success was not just because working class white men supported him. Among all whites without a college degree Trump beat Clinton 67 percent to 28 percent, and he beat her 49 percent to 45 percent among all whites with a college degree. Indeed, he won 53 percent of the vote of all white women.

White women, particularly those with college degrees, are unlikely to have voted for Trump because they suffer from “precarious manhood,” desire to reclaim “masculine power”, or worry about losing “manly dignity.” Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is closer to a complete answer to why Trump’s misogyny didn’t drive away white voters when she calls attention to the “Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome,” an aversion to Clinton on the part of many white men and white women that is so strong that it just doesn’t matter what Trump says about her.

The Power of Gender Stereotypes

It is well established that powerful women are judged more harshly than are powerful men by both women and men. The sexist comments Trump made about Clinton were effective because they affirmed the views many people already had of her. They saw Clinton as the personification of the non-traditional woman. She doesn’t stay home and bake chocolate chip cookies. Instead, she is out doing men’s jobs, and doing them in a confident, assertive, and competitive way. Because she doesn’t conform to traditional female stereotypes – modest, warm, caring, and submissive – she is viewed very negatively by both white women and white men: she is seen as bitter, quarrelsome, deceitful, selfish, devious, manipulative and cold. Clinton’s violation of the strong proscriptive gender stereotypes made Trump’s sexist attacks on her acceptable, even applauded.

In a perverse way, Trump’s victory may provide a needed wakeup call that aggressive, deeply felt, and very discriminatory sexism is alive and well in America. As Carol Moseley-Braun, the first female African-American Senator, commented, “I think in some regards the gender biases are more profound and more central to our culture than even the racial ones, and that to me was the surprise.” Perhaps if people of good will heed that wakeup call and redouble their efforts to expose sexism for the cowardly, self-protective, irrational prejudice it is, something positive can be salvaged form this horrible, terrifying campaign.