Gender stereotypes shape reactions to Trump-Musk outburst
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Elon Musk and Donald Trump's very public clash is rekindling a debate over gender stereotypes.
Why it matters: The reality is few leaders could get away with feuding on social media. But the debacle revealed competing views about how powerful men — and women — might be expected to communicate.
Driving the news: The fight drew observations on social media and various media outlets that the president and world's richest CEO were acting more like "Real Housewives" — or defying the trope that women are the ones more prone to emotional outbursts.
- Yet even those observations received backlash in some feminist circles for invoking gender references at all to slam their behavior.
- "One of the oldest and most persistent gender stereotypes is that women are too emotional," Harvard Business Review contributors wrote in a research paper disputing the stereotype last year. It "hurts women's leadership prospects as they are seen as less fit for leader roles because they are perceived to be more likely to make irrational, emotion-driven decisions than men."
State of play: In Trump's case, he won two elections after casting two women opponents (Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) as temperamentally unfit for the job.
- Some Americans may have agreed with him: A Georgetown University poll released in 2019 found about 13% of Americans said men were better suited emotionally than women for political office.
In a pithy reference to stereotypes, journalist Sam Stein posted on X: "Are men maybe too emotional for positions of leadership?"
- CNN's Abby Phillip also quipped on air: "These men, too emotional to lead, apparently."
- Case in point: At one point in the war of words Thursday, Trump wrote that he "took away" Musk's electric vehicles mandate in the "one big, beautiful bill" at the root of their breakup, and his former adviser "just went CRAZY!"
- By Friday, the president told CNN's Dana Bash: "I'm not even thinking about Elon."
What they're saying: "Oh man, the girls are fighting, aren't they?" Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told a reporter Thursday in D.C. (Some people got the meme she's referencing, which originated from rapper Azealia Banks. Others saw it as negatively coded toward women or girls.)
- Right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec posted on X: "Some of y'all cant handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows," he wrote. "This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric)."
- New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose responded to Posobiec's view of masculinity: "Historically, 'phallocentric' communication was that you walked over to a guy and punched him in the face, or asked him to step outside."
- "Hurling epithets over social media ... is not behavior that I think of as traditionally male; if anything, it's passive-aggressive and female coded," she wrote.
The bottom line: It's hard to imagine a woman CEO — let alone president — engaging in a public feud with a onetime ally on apps they respectively own.
Go deeper: Repricing Elon Musk and his empire
