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Why has the U.S. still not elected a woman president, even though the U.S. is often depicted as a country of freedom? There are many countries that have elected a woman president. Still, the U.S. has not been successful in electing a woman president. What are the factors behind this reason?

Rick Smith
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RAH7
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    I've removed the secondary question because a) it's speculative, and b) asking two questions at once would have made this too broad. – F1Krazy Oct 05 '23 at 15:46
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    I’m voting to close this question because it is unanswerable as it defends on so many factors that are unknown. – Joe W Oct 05 '23 at 15:47
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    Regarding your main question, I'll note that equality doesn't mean the US is obliged to elect a female president. It just means that women have the same opportunities to become president as men, without any additional obstacles. On a surface level, the reason is because there's only been one female presidential candidate (not counting third parties, who have no realistic chance of winning regardless of gender) and she lost. – F1Krazy Oct 05 '23 at 15:50
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    Many women have indeed run for President, but only one has succeeded in making it to a nomination, and largely because she was well known and her husband was previously President. – Machavity Oct 05 '23 at 15:55
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    Indeed, women have been running for President since 1872. – dan04 Oct 05 '23 at 16:16
  • Puritanism has had a long and influential history in the United States. Women, in their interpretation of the Protestant world view, could be neither clergy nor elected officials. That persists to this day although the Puritans have mostly died out. –  Oct 05 '23 at 16:40
  • I think I'd like to close this question, I'm afraid there might be negative effects or other negative things I don't know about because of this question. I apologize for any inconvenience. – RAH7 Oct 05 '23 at 17:47
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    "There are many countries that have elected a woman president." But there are also many countries that never had a women in the highest possible political office. The US are surely not an exception. If only we knew how many countries are in each category. – NoDataDumpNoContribution Oct 05 '23 at 19:01
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    One possible factor is that US elected officials tend to be older. The current President is 80, the median Senator is 65, and the median House member is 58. Which means they started their careers in an era where women were less likely to run for elected office. (Of course, the late Senator Dianne Feinstein was an exception.) – dan04 Oct 05 '23 at 19:07
  • @RAH7 You certainly do not have to apologize. While I also voted to close, it was because this question is very hard to answer with any certainty (F1Krazy's comment goes into some good reasons why). Not because it inherently something that shouldn't be questioned, if perhaps elsewhere than here. You were, IMHO, rather ill-treated by the pile-on downvoting, which should not be happening with a new user. It was enough to close the question. Welcome aboard. – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica Oct 06 '23 at 22:14
  • IMHO you've got DVs because of the "freedom" opener, possibly implying that's related. Of course, it was related for a while, as women didn't [universally] get the/to vote until ~100 years or so ago in the US. But that's certainly not the main issue nowadays, so it seems quaint and weird to open with that, to say the least. We get a lot of US-bashing questions here for reasons that are somewhat easy to predict, so some tend to vote them down rather quickly when new accounts post something of that flavor. – the gods from engineering Oct 07 '23 at 01:40
  • Rather related Q: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/25224/why-are-there-so-many-woman-leaders-in-south-asian-countries-while-there-are-non – the gods from engineering Oct 07 '23 at 01:52

2 Answers2

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I would like to challenge the supposition of the question - many women have been elected to power in the United States, and despite none being elected as President to date, this does not preclude them from trying.

First off, it is not that unusual for there to be so few female leaders of a free country - only a third of all UN countries have ever had a woman leader

Women currently serve as the head of government in just 13 of the 193 member states of the United Nations. And fewer than a third of UN countries have ever had a woman leader, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

That is not to say that women are not represented in the United State's governing body - in fact, the number of women in the 118th congress is record-breaking.

Women make up more than a quarter (28%) of all members of the 118th Congress – the highest percentage in U.S. history and a considerable increase from where things stood even a decade ago.

And historically a number of women have run for president and on a presidential ticket, with current Vice President Kamala Harris being the first woman Vice-President in the country.

Zibbobz
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    Hillary Clinton would have been POTUS in 2016, if only the US would be a 100% democracy where every vote weighs equal. – NoDataDumpNoContribution Oct 05 '23 at 19:02
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution: The statement "Hillary Clinton won the popular vote" is not equivalent to "Hillary Clinton would have won the election if it were done by popular vote." Because changing the rules of the game changes the strategy. The candidates would have campaigned in different places. So maybe Clinton would have won, but maybe Trump would have. Or maybe completely different candidates would have been nominated. We can't be sure. – dan04 Oct 05 '23 at 19:12
  • @dan04 Okay, I agree. We can't be sure. Still I wanted to express my strong conviction that Hillary Clinton would have had an excellent chance to already have been the first female POTUS in 2016 if only every vote would weigh the same, i.e. If the US was a 100% democracy. The majority in popular vote for her was quite strong. – NoDataDumpNoContribution Oct 05 '23 at 22:19
  • To add to this that, if you go back to roughly pre-Merkel times, the election of female national leaders was very much an exception in Western countries. Thatcher and Golda Meir are the exceptions I can think of. So it's really only the last 10-20 years were there one could reasonably expect some movement on this front from the US and that doesn't cover too many elections. And, well, almost happened in 2016: to some extent, given the flaws of her opponent, Hillary Clinton's loss had a lot to do with her personality and voter outreach and she could/should have won. – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica Oct 06 '23 at 22:12
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The US has the highest rate of traditional religiosity of any of the industrialized nations, and the US Presidency is strongly constituted as commander-in-chief of the military. This combination of religious paternalism and martial assumptions puts a heavily masculine bias on the perception of the office, which translates to a masculinist bias in voting patterns.

This may change as the Baby Boom generation continues to die off, and the millennial and Gen-Z cohort comes into power. Those groups tend to be less authoritarian and more egalitarian.

Ted Wrigley
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    And of course you have a poll, study, something to back that up? Or should we just take your word for it? Has France, for example, not an extremely religious nation, had a female president? It is quite possibly, pending references, a factor. Is it the the factor? – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica Oct 06 '23 at 17:17
  • @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica: Sigh... US religiosity is an old and well-documented statistic; there's nothing controversial about that statement at all (except that people don't like it). The military role of the US president is also established and non-controversial. If you choose not to believe that religion and the military have a masculinist bias, that's your business. But I'd think you'd have better things to do that squabble over an answer on a closed question. – – Ted Wrigley Oct 06 '23 at 18:29
  • @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica: how many women have won the Republican nomination? – the gods from engineering Oct 07 '23 at 01:33
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    I don't know that any major religious philosophy states that a woman can't be a leader of a government. It has happened with majority Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish nations. Since it's so 'well-documented' that 'religiosity' has something to do with women not being elected to the highest position of power, it should be trivial matter for you provide one or two supporting links that counter the reality of what's happened ateast a few times, and nearly happened in the U.S. recently. – ouflak Oct 10 '23 at 16:36
  • @ouflak: Hmm... Just exactly how many female popes have there been? But that's irrelevant, since I never said that "'religiosity' has something to do with women not being elected to the highest position of power". I said that religions were largely paternalistic, which biases religious people towards giving men positions of power. I assume you are capable of understanding the concept of 'bias', and I assume you will steadfastly refuse to do so (mainly because you've already staked out this ridiculous position), so I guess there's nowhere for this conversation to go. Have a good one! – Ted Wrigley Oct 10 '23 at 17:22