After Kamala Harris loses, is America just not ready for a woman to be president? Experts say it's not that simple

In the span of eight years, President-elect Donald Trump has defeated the first two women to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party, extinguishing their attempts to shatter the glass ceiling and become America's first female commander in chief.

The collective defeats of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday raise a potentially uncomfortable question about the role of gender in national politics: Is the American public ready for a female president? 

Scholars who study the role of women in politics contend there is no simple answer, but say there was more than gender at play when it came to the presidential race this year. They point out that Democratic candidates performed poorly overall.

Harris joined the race late after President Joe Biden announced he wouldn't seek reelection, while under pressure from other Democrats after a shaky debate performance against Trump. The vice president faced stiff headwinds, from inflation to the Biden administration's unpopular immigration policies — key issues that scholars say may have saddled the vice president's candidacy from the start.

Exit polls showed one of the top factors for voters was dissatisfaction with the country’s direction and a "rejection" of the current leadership, so it’s unclear whether a male Democratic candidate would have tipped the scales in that party's favor in the presidential race, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. 

"If you look across the board, Democrats fared pretty poorly yesterday, regardless of their identity," she added.

Dittmar said the presidential race result "absolutely" couldn't be ascribed solely to either Harris' gender or race.

Dina Refki, director of the University at Albany Center for Women in Government and Civil Society, said women are held to higher standards, despite showing similar or greater capabilities than their male counterparts.

Meanwhile, Trump — a convicted felon, who as U.S. president was the only commander in chief to be impeached twice while in office — isn't held to the same  standards, some experts pointed out.

Refki said Harris ran a strong campaign, successfully mobilizing her base and raising millions in a short period of time, but was burdened by the belief of some voters that she wasn't up for the job.

"It’s the perception that she cannot deliver, and she does not have the same competence of her white, male counterpart, and so that has its roots in the intersections of gender and race and her identity," she said. "But people voted ultimately with their pocketbooks and so that is a factor."

Shelley Brazley, a former legislative aide to Town of Hempstead Senior Councilwoman Dorothy Goosby, said race and gender “absolutely” played a part in Trump’s success. She said Harris being a Black woman was a “problem for many people, including Black people” when it came to casting a vote in the presidential election.

Brazley, who is Black, added she thinks men aren’t ready for a woman to be president. But she said she also believes Harris’ loss was more complicated. She pointed to Harris' late entry into the race and said Democrats were “not addressing anybody’s needs while trying to address everybody’s needs.”

Election results show Republicans nationwide, meanwhile, won a majority in the U.S. Senate, appear to have increased their advantage in the House of Representatives (though control of the chamber has not been called), and grew their base among young men, minorities and voters in key urban centers such as New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee — all Democratic strongholds. 

"The results are less about whether or not a woman could win and more about what we are willing to accept in our political leaders as it pertains to their beliefs and positions on issues around gender equity and racial progress and inclusion, because we have yet again elected a president who has vocally stood against those values," Dittmar said.

While Clinton leaned into her historic candidacy eight years ago as an opportunity to elect the first female U.S. president, Harris, who is Black and South Asian, avoided that narrative during her campaign.

Instead, she relied on issues such as abortion and reproductive rights following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 in an effort to drive more women to her camp.

The strategy had only mixed results.

In 2024, female voters backed Harris compared with Trump by a 54% to 44% margin — roughly the same percentage by which Trump won male voters — according to a poll conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool consortium of ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News.

But, Harris' margin with female voters trailed behind their support for Biden in 2020 and the only segment of the electorate that she made sizable gains with was college-educated women, the poll showed.

Meanwhile, the poll indicated abortion proved not to be the galvanizing force with the electorate as it was during the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats performed better than expected. 

Trump's campaign, meanwhile, made a hard appeal to boost its share of male voters, including Hispanics, Blacks and those under the age of 30.

The strategy paid off, with Trump making gains with each of the three groups, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 115,000 voters nationwide.

It found about 8 in 10 Black voters backed Harris, down from about 9 in 10 that supported Biden four years earlier.

More than half of all Hispanic voters supported Harris, although that number was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 who voted for Biden in 2020, according to VoteCast data.

And roughly half of all voters under the age of 30 voted for Harris, compared with about 60% who backed Biden in 2020, the AP survey data shows. Slightly more than 4 in 10 young voters went for Trump this year, up from about one-third in 2020, the data shows.

Meena Bose, executive dean of Hofstra University's Public Policy and Public Service programs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, said she doesn’t believe the vote result “is a referendum on whether a woman can be president” but rather that “the Democratic agenda was less persuasive to voters than the Republican agenda."

The United States is far from alone in failing to ever elect a female president.

More than two-thirds — 69% — of United Nations member states never have elected a woman to serve as head of state, according to the Pew Research Center. And women currently lead just 13 of the 193 U.N. countries, Pew said in a report last month.

The stakes for women to push for representation in public office, Refki said, will continue to grow higher during the second Trump administration — as will the need for resiliency among Harris voters.

"It’s really a blow to women with all that is on the line for this for the next four years," she said. "But I think that it behooves us to really keep the struggle going."