Can we finally talk about how Racism and Sexism helped Trump in 2024 election?!

Ignoring this won't make this issue go away

Cable news has been filled for more than a month with autopsies of the 2024 election. (This is, of course, ironic given we will soon be engaged in autopsies discussing why cable news died.) We have heard every reason for why Donald Trump won ranging from the idiotic “if only VP Harris went on Joe Rogan’s podcast” to Democrats don’t know how to speak to people to Democrats care about the wrong people, etc.

But missing from the conversation is a look at the two issues that fueled so much of Trump’s support: Racism and Sexism. I know: Not all Trump supporters are motivated by sexism and racism. (At least I have to say that!) In reality, I do think there were various reasons why people cast a ballot for Trump apart for these two issues.

However, corporate media has barely touched on how both sexism and racism played a powerful role in this election given who VP Harris is. And that is a mistake because the only way to reduce both is to address them head on.

The reason we can say with confidence that racism and especially sexism played an oversized role in Harris’s loss is because the data backs this up. No, I don’t mean exit polls because few if any will literally tell a pollster: “I didn’t vote for Harris because she is a woman.” The data comes from how few women are in leadership positions in the corporate world and polls that tell us men would greatly prefer a male boss to a female one.

Let’s start with the CEO’s of the nation’s top 500 companies known as the Fortune 500. These large companies account for two-thirds of our nation’s GDP with $18.8 trillion in revenues. Want to guess how many female CEOs there are in of Fortune 500 companies in 2024? Keep in mind that women are a majority in the United States.

The answer is 52. Yep, just 10% of the top 500 corporations in the United States have a female CEO. It’s actually worse when it comes to female CEO’s at the S&P 500 companies—which are top 500 corporations in terms of market capitalization. In that case, women occupied merely 41 or 8.2% of the CEO positions.

Want to guess how many of the Fortune 500 companies are headed by Black women? Did you guess two? Yes, just two. And for Black men, it’s only slightly better with eight—meaning despite the fact Blacks represent 13% of our population they only head a little over 1% of the top companies.

Obviously. things have moved forward from decades ago. The 52 female CEOs we have today is more than double the number of women who ran Fortune 500 businesses six years ago. And if you go back 25 years, only two women headed Fortune 500 companies.

But as the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent article, the progress that has been building has recently “stalled” in terms of women as CEOs and elected to Congress. So while the above numbers show us that women are woefully underrepresented as heads of companies, those numbers are on the verge of backsliding.

What contributes to the fact that only just about 10% of large companies are headed by women? Well there have been countless papers written about this topic such as a recent one titled, “Underrepresentation of Women CEOs” that appeared in a Harvard Law School publication. This research paper noted that past studies point to three factors to explain this from women having unique family obligations to women having a different skill sets such as “teamwork and communication, while men thrive in hard skills like analysis, strategy, and execution.”

The third reason often cited is “a tendency to discriminate against women” that can “lead to a deliberate avoidance of promoting women to leadership positions, even if it comes at the expense of company profitability.”

We can argue all day the real reason. But the bottom line is that our nation has a problem with women as the heads of big companies. And our elections are just another manifestation of that with some voters having issues with a female CEO of the nation.

Polls show more men would prefer a male boss over a female one. The gap is closing with an increasing number of people telling pollsters they don’t care about the sex of their boss. But of the men who said gender mattered, nearly 2 to 1 preferred a male boss. Twenty something men were nearly evenly split on their preference of gender--but still even younger men have an issue with a woman as their leader.

Taking it back to politics, a poll released in October 2024 found only 77% of Americans believe that “Women are as qualified as men to hold the highest offices in government.” While in general 77% supporting an issue would be good, in this case it means nearly 25% of voters don’t believe “Women are as qualified as men” to be President making it much harder for a woman to win the White House. That same poll found that while nearly 90% of Democrats hope the U.S. will elect a female president during their lifetime, only 13% of Republicans want to see that. That is not a typo—only 13% of Republicans want to see a female President. And when it comes to men overall, just 38% want to see a female President.

All of this plays into why Trump won 55% of men in the 2024 election including 60% of white men and 51% of Latino men. Only Black men voted for Harris in a big way at 77%--nearly identical to how they voted for Biden in 2020.

This data absolutely does not mean Democrats should avoid nominating a female candidate. Rather my point is that many in our nation have issues with women in leadership positions. This 100% contributed to Trump winning. Yet corporate media has chosen to focus on everything else but this issue. And by doing so corporate media again avoids the hard truths that need to be addressed as well as helping normalize both sexism and racism.

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