Gender Differences in Gubernatorial Response to Crisis

• In Event: The State Executive Branch In and Out of Crisis

Abstract

Female heads of government received attention in the media for their handling of the novel coronavirus during the spring and summer of 2020. CNN’s website ran the headline “Women leaders are doing a disproportionately great
job at handling the pandemic” on April 16 (Fincher 2020). The following week, reporters for the The Guardian wrote that “From Germany to New Zealand and Denmark to Taiwan, women have managed the coronavirus crisis with aplomb” (Henley and Roy 2020). Also in April, Forbes ran a piece on women’s handling of covid-19, noting that rates of per capita testing in Germany are higher than in any of the country’s peers, while Slovakia was one of the first nations to institute lockdowns. Both countries are headed by women.

In this article, we move beyond the anecdotal evidence offered in news reports, to a systematic study of sex differences in gubernatorial use of unilateral powers during emergencies. We investigate whether female executives approach using unilateral orders differently than their male peers by comparing an unprecedented new data source on Executive Orders issued by governors nationwide from the late 1990s through the COVID pandemic.

There are many reasons to think that female leaders might take distinctive approaches when using emergency related executive action. For example, the global pandemic was a public health emergency, and ample scholarship shows that women in government are especially active on issues related to health (e.g. Atkinson 2020; Atkinson and Windett 2019, Bratton and Haynie 1999; Osborn and Mendez 2010). These same studies show that female lawmakers are also more apt to introduce legislation and to speak on the chamber floor about issues that directly relate to women than are their male colleagues. Interviews with lawmakers also find that
women in Congress often view representing women’s issues as an important part of their jobs (Carroll 2002; Dittmar et al. 2017). This might make women in government more likely to focus on unilateral action that could disproportionately impact women.

For instance, one of the first issues states grappled with in early 2020 was whether and when to close schools and childcare facilities. Because women devote roughly 50% more time to childcare than men do, on average, these issues have disparate impacts on women and men (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020a). Women also make up an out-sized share of the work-
force in the education and health services sector—it was 74.8% female in 2019 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). For these reasons, we might expect to see female governors take distinct approaches when drafting orders related to the education and health aspects of their states.

Many other aspects of crisis response present novel areas of debate. For instance, most members of government had never drafted legislation related to mask-wearing or social distancing prior to 2020, and Americans had probably not given these issues much thought. These topics represent “uncrystallized” issues– issues with which the public has not previously grappled (Mansbridge 1999). When government’s take up such issues, female leaders may be especially apt to act as descriptive representatives (Pearson and Dancey 2011).

For all of these reasons, we might expect Executive Orders issued by female politicians to be distinct from those of men. We might also expect to find some similarities between the orders, especially those from the same party. But additional factors, including region, also affect the diffusion of policies across localities (e.g. Gray 1973; Walker
1969).

The data collected for this project consists of over 14,000 executive orders spanning 20 years from all 50 states in the United States. These documents were scraped directly from state archives, governor's web pages, and other government agencies. We have also scraped metadata for the orders including the state of the EO, the date of the EO, the governor who issued the EO, and information on the specific governor. Using algorithms that detect text reuse, we examine the degree to which female and male governors respond to the challenges of emergency response in distinct ways. Our findings reveal that sex has played only a small role in the distinctiveness of the policies enacted by executive order enacted. With few exceptions, the orders implemented by governors across the United States are quite dissimilar from one another, regardless of the sex of the governor

Author

• Jason H. Windett, University of North Carolina, Charlotte