Study finds faces of GOP congresswomen more feminine than Democrats’

A pair of UCLA researchers says partisanship is all in the face.

Dubbing it the “Michele Bachmann effect,” their study of the women of Congress finds that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have stereotypically feminine facial features.

The study’s author, Colleen Carpinella, said in a Thursday news release that the correlation “increases the more conservative the lawmaker’s voting record [is].”

Researchers came to their conclusion by scanning portraits of members of Congress in a computer modeling program. The program determined how many typically feminine or masculine characteristics each face possessed.

"We weren't looking at hairstyle, jewelry or whether a person was wearing make up or not," Carpinella said. "We wanted to get an objective measure of how masculine or feminine a face is, based on a scientifically derived average for male or female appearance." 

The study found that the mugs of the women of the GOP were twice as feminine as their Democratic counterparts.

A group of politically unaware undergraduate students was also able to figure out the female House members’ political affiliation simply by looking at photographs. 

The news release touting the findings contends displays of femininity “can be problematic for female professionals because past research has demonstrated that people tend to view women as either competent or feminine — not both.”

The study’s findings will be released in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

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