"Tinsley: Hillary Clinton's campaign shows us how latent biases matter"

In "Tinsley: Hillary Clinton's campaign shows us how latent biases matter", Tinsley a professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business questions the reason why New York Senator Hillary Clinton lost the democratic presidential nomination. Through out the commentary professor Tinsley argues that the reason why Senator Clinton lost the nomination was due to her gender. The professor supports her argument by mentioning a series of studies that have been taking place since 2005. The study contrast how the public of both genders portray males and females with the same job position when these professionals behave the same way under certain circumstances. Tinsley goes in depth explaining how under all given circumstances in the study males always were approved of their behavior, or where seen likely and competent of their decision-making, without taking into consideration what was their decision. On the other hand, women’s behavior was seen as offensive or either likeable and incompetent or unlikeable and competent when they made the same decisions as the males did.

In conclusion, the professor suggest that the discrimination against women still is very present, even though many females today hold important executive offices as males do. She does take the time to make it clear that is not a gender war what is causing the differences, but a cultural fight. Moreover, she says that we, women are “willing to criticize the female executives” as harshly as men do, which leads her to say that prejudice towards “fellow members” still is very common.

Although, professor Tinsley supports her argument by recent studies, what guarantees us that the reason why Senator Clinton lost the nomination was due to her gender? There could have been other reasons for example greater support for Obama’s political agenda, campaign tactics, etc. May be, Miss Clinton focused on the wrong potential voter audience. We have to keep in mind that yes, Clinton could have been the first female presidential candidate but Obama is the first African American presidential candidate. Therefore, there was something more than being female that affected Clinton’s outcome. They both had a minority backing them up, Obama had the support of the majority of African Americans, but Clinton had the majority of Hispanics. Her flaw could have been on getting out the vote strategies. Now that the race for nomination is over, we cannot know for sure where things when wrong, but we can be certain of one thing we cannot be sure that the sole reason why Clinton lost was due to her gender.