gender trumps race

race may be easier to overcome than gender. i believe i have mentioned before of my discussions with students, etc. who believe that we will have a black male president before a female one. [these discussions took place well before either was a possibility.] i just recently had a conversation with a man who felt the opposite. but the author of this article doesn't seem to agree.

i have recently studied how the brain categorizes to save energy and how this, over time, has influenced our stereotypes of groups of people. the author points out that experiments have shown that the brain categorizes people by race in less than 100 milliseconds, about 50 milliseconds before determining sex. evolutionary psychologists believe we’re "hard-wired to be suspicious of people outside our own group, to save our ancestors from blithely greeting enemy tribes of cave men. In contrast, there’s no hard-wired hostility toward women, though men may have a hard-wired desire to control and impregnate them.

Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as 'blacks.' ...

"The challenge for women competing in politics or business is less misogyny than unconscious sexism: Americans don’t hate women, but they do frequently stereotype them as warm and friendly, creating a mismatch with the stereotype we hold of leaders as tough and strong. So voters (women as well as men, though a bit less so) may feel that a female candidate is not the right person for the job because of biases they’re not even aware of."

see, Hillary never had a chance.