why is the moment you ask someone is a woman as electable as a man how come the moment you ask that everything changes yeah this is this was one of those really remarkable we didn't do this 00:21:01 research so i can brag about it right right it's regina bateson this is really fantastic research looking at gender bias in politics right because it's unbelievable 00:21:14 like women are so underrepresented in intellectual politics it's just you can't it's but like here's the thing like it's important to understand what's driving that and and for sure let's just be clear just straight up sexism 00:21:27 certainly is involved sometimes like that that's certainly the case but what what uh dr bateson found what i think was really fascinating is that given our winner-take-all um like sort of two-party system 00:21:41 so much is dependent on what the gatekeepers think who who because now like if we were doing something like ranked choice voting it doesn't really matter i don't have to care what i think anybody else thinks right but in a winner-take-all system i 00:21:54 have to do a little bit of guessing about who do i think most people are going to vote for right because otherwise my vote is quote unquote wasted right if i take a flyer on that so what was interesting is if you look at how women perform when they are 00:22:08 nominated in general elections women win at the same rate as white men it's just so i suggest obviously it's not a general election problem and what what she found was that it was like 00:22:20 party leaders especially donors right they're like well wait a minute i'm not sexist but i think most people in the party are so i don't think you're going to be able to win and so they don't get the support they don't get the the 00:22:32 resources and it becomes self-fulfilling it's so clear when you put it that way how that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy but there there is so much pressure within certain groups to say this the the dominant ideology and just 00:22:44 like don't like if you can't it's like a cult right because like the second you question maybe you're like what does the evidence actually show they're like you're out you're not being loyal um wow 00:22:57 yeah so that's it's actually um in the book i i was looking at what i call these conformity traps like these these three kinds of situations where you are likely to slip into blind conformity and you are quite likely to do that 00:23:10 under an illusion to begin with and you know this this sort of identity trap where you've got these groups that matter so much to who you are right and and especially when it's just one group that group has cult-like power 00:23:23 over you