Amy Klobuchar's hot dish is seen in a 2011 hot dish competition on Capitol Hill.
- Last week, The New York Times published a story on Amy Klobuchar's hot dish recipe, a casserole that she and campaign surrogates have been bringing to events in Iowa.
- While it may seem like an innocuous story, political and gender bias experts told Business Insider the focus on Klobuchar's domesticity reveal some of the challenges women face in politics.
- While women win races about as often as men, they are still underrepresented in politics and have a harder time getting voters to like them due to deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, the experts said.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
In the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses, the most talked-about Amy Klobuchar story was not about her politics, but her cooking.
On January 28, The New York Times published a story about the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate's hot dish recipe, a state staple that she and campaign surrogates have been doling out at Iowa campaign events to win over fellow Midwesterners.
The story calls to mind another gendered campaign food moment. When Bill Clinton was first running for president in 1992, his wife Hillary faced backlash when she defended her decision to be a working mom.
"I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life," Hillary said at the time.
Are Klobuchar's hot dish parties a way to separate herself from the likes of Clinton, who was often described as "cold" when she ran for president in 2008 and 2016?
Experts on women in politics and gender biases told Business Insider the hot dish story represents the gender stereotypes that female candidates have to face when they run for higher office, and how much deep-seated sexism still pervades society.
The Klobuchar campaign didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment for this story.
Women have to be both a candidate and a mom
Princeton professor Lauren Wright, who teaches courses on women and politics, said Klobuchar's recipe, and the backlash Clinton faced over cookies, are "a good comparison" because they show that when women run, they're expected to be both a candidate and a wife and mother.
She pointed to the questions that were raised when Clinton was running for president in 2016 over who would fulfill the typical "first lady duties." Clinton said she would still pick out the the china and flower arrangements.
"I think it's very interesting how what ends up happening in these situations is women also maintain their traditional role of spouse and mother, and they also do all the other work of campaigning," Wright said. "So it's not that the responsibilities shift, it's just that they expand for women candidates."
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, second left, samples hot dish entrants in the ninth annual Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Competition on April 9, 2019.
In other words, they have to do it all.
This makes it harder when women run for office, Wright said. "Women running for office have an uphill battle" already because "we associate power with masculinity and the collective image we have of a president of the United States in our head is male."
"But of equal importance to voters is authenticity and relatability and genuineness. Women can't be inauthentic, but they can't be too feminine and they can't be too masculine," Wright said. "So they end up walking this tightrope that is frankly nearly impossible to accomplish."
A quick Google search showed that no other candidate currently running had shared a recipe before, besides Sen. Elizabeth Warren's submissions to a 1984 Native American cookbook.
During the 2016 Democratic primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders whipped up a custom cocktail for supporters at events, but bartending is markedly a more masculine activity.
Back in May when Sen. Kamala Harris was still in the race, her husband tweeted a photo showing her at home, in an apron, whipping up a batch of jerk chicken marinade in-between events in Los Angeles.
A tightrope walk
Peter Glick, a sexism expert at Lawrence University, also compared the balance female politicians have to strike to a tightrope walk.
"There's higher standards for women's warmth. If you're going to go and confide in somebody, you probably seek out a woman. You expect more sympathy, more empathy. Women are socialized to be that way. So we have these very high standards for women.
"That's the problem when you're doing something like running for office, especially president. Women have to generally try to soften that image. They have to garner respect and show that they're tough enough. At the same time, they have to walk this tightrope where they've also got to combat this backlash that occurs on the warmth dimension. And one way to do that is baking cookies and making a casserole," he said.
Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar, left, is seen at a campaign event in Iowa on February 1 with her daughter, Abigail, center, and husband, John Bressler, right.
The hot dish parties may actually be in direct response to some of the critiques the Minnesota senator faced early on in the race, Glick said.
"We know Amy Klobuchar got bagged early on in this cycle of maybe being mean, or that cold thing. And so you know, I imagine a savvy politician is going to try to grab that warmth, and one of the ways to do it - especially for women - is to do something that fits in with these traditional stereotypes. Motherhood is subjectively one of the most positive, glowing things you can trade off of. So it's no surprise that female politicians would try to do that," he said.
Former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who now heads the LGBTQ Victory Fund, said "there are all sorts of things that female candidates have to navigate that male candidates don't."
"From inordinate focus on our hairstyle, to our clothes, to the age of our children and who's taking care of them if you're not taking care of them, to 'Can you be a politician and a domestic goddess at the same time?' You can kind of roll your eyes and go along with it or you can be outraged about it" Parker said. "And I'm sort of the I'll roll my eyes and get along with it so long as it doesn't interfere with what I really need to do."
'She's owning it'
Not all of the experts we spoke to found Klobuchar's hot dish problematic.
Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said the difference here is that Klobuchar is voluntarily sharing this part of her life with voters.
"I know there's been some comment about whether this is sexist in some way, but I think she put it out there herself. She's owning it," Walsh said. "Hot dishes in Minnesota in particular are in fact a staple. It's part of the culture and I think she's embracing that Midwestern culture that she comes from. It makes her very accessible and real."
She added: "If it's the media, and we're going to her and not to men and asking, 'What's your favorite recipe?' That would be a problem."
After facing backlash for saying that she wasn't the type of woman to stay at home and bake cookies, Hillary Clinton later competed against Barbara Bush in a cookie baking challenge. A batch of Clinton's winning cookies is seen at a 2003 Clinton event.
Can a woman win?
Whether or not Klobuchar's hot dish recipe plays into gender politics in the 2020 Democratic primary, there's no question that every Democratic candidate has faced questions of "electability" this cycle.
Warren confronted those questions head-on at the last Democratic debate, pointing out that she and Klobuchar - the only women on the stage - were the only candidates who have won every race they ran for.
This is reflected in politics in general, a fact experts mentioned to us multiple times.
"The amazing thing is that women actually succeed when we run, at least at the rates of male candidates," Parker said.
"For my own organization, lesbian candidates outperform our male candidates. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One being that a lot of women wait until later in their careers, they have more experience before they run. So they're actually better prepared than their male opponents," Parker added.
Wright pointed out that both Warren and Klobuchar "have great records legislatively."
"They've done a lot more than Bernie Sanders has in their time as senators. And that really fits the general trend we see for women running for office there," Wright added. "They're very prepared and they tend to be elite candidates and that's why they do about as well as men on average at the congressional level."
Then First Lady Hillary Clinton is seen reading to children at the White House in 1998.
Women have come a long way, but there's not parity in politics yet
The experts we talked to were mostly optimistic when asked whether things are getting easier for women running for office, but they said we still have a lot of work to do as a society.
"If you look at the bigger longterm view, where we've come from and where we've gone to, there's certainly a ton of progress. I think that some of these remaining tricky kind of barriers are not as obvious and therefore they're in some ways pretty insidious," Glick said.
He said we're "kind of socialized to have a bit of distaste" for ambitious women, but that this prejudice can be hard to acknowledge.
"It can be something where people are not very well aware of it. It sort of like, 'Well I just don't like her so much,'" he said.
"I think the gender issues are still there," Walsh said. "When the center was founded in 1971, I can tell you the exact number of women who were serving in Congress at the time. And the fact that we are where we are now when it comes to women's representation shows tremendous progress."
"But still, we're not post-gender. There' still stereotypes that are used against women," she added. "There are still double standards. There's still far too much attention paid to appearance for women that's not for the men who are in office. There's still comments about women's voices and how they present themselves."
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Our Iowa Campaign Chair @DrAndyMcGuire said it best!
"Hot dish is a symbol of coming together, of a time when we weren't so rude to each other… Caucuses are very much a neighborly coming together, so it's the perfect thing."https://t.co/9WKpYQ1WG4
- Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) January 29, 2020