Putting Scandinavian Equality to the Test: An Experimental Evaluation of

Gender Stereotyping of Political Candidates in a Sample of Norwegian Voters

By Richard E. Matland

The author used as analysis methods the experiment and observation. The purpose of the analysis
is to test the equality of men and women candidates in elections and the bias to elect women in
Scandinavian countries. Methods used are relevant for the analysis purpose, in order to test the
hypotheses according which there are no policy areas in which gender bias offer an advantage to
either women or men candidates. The author used an experiment to test the gender equality in
policy areas, in which neither men nor women are perceived as superior. The information
amount gathered dismantles the hypothesis of the researcher. The experiment results showed that
women are favored regarding competency competent in education and health policies and less
favored in policies as economy and defense. The great number of female representatives in
Scandinavian countries politics seems to be more related to the political culture and less to
perception of equality in competency.
The results of the experiment show that the party orientation of the voters can influence their
opinion regarding women competency, both negative or positive in some policy areas, based on
stereotypes, according which women are more competent in caring (education, health) and less
competent in economic and defense. Voters bias can be also expressed by the candidate political
orientation (Labor and Conservative in this case).
In my opinion the data clearly show the existence gender schemata, according which voters are
classifying candidates according to their assumed competency in some policy areas. The
analysis design was appropriate, because the researcher used the same speeches with different
name, in order to clearly show that gender bias is present in voters behavior in Scandinavian
countries. Further, the researcher demonstrates that voters are inclined to categorize candidates
competency according to their gender. As the author stated in conclusions, further testing should
be done in order to analyses other samples for increasing the quality of the research.