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Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Election 2 34 years of previous public service experience against a candidate with no public service experience. (For context, the average president brings 22 years of previous public service to the office, with Woodrow Wilson on the low end with two years of service and a doctorate in political science and Harry S. Truman at the high end with 62 years of service.2) Had the imbalance run the other way, or had Trump had military experience that Clinton lacked, it would be easy to chalk up the findings of this book to basic competitive variables. The sharp contrast between Clinton and Trump on this variable makes it easier to untangle the influence of sex and gender because if both candidates were male, public discourse would logically give the more seasoned candidate an edge. The third reason the 2016 election is ideal for analysis is that Trump’s hypermasculinity played such a central role in the electoral contest that the question is not whether sex and gender mattered but how they manifested and mattered. One factor that limits the findings of this book is Trump’s exceptionalism. He was unique as a presidential contender in many key ways, but Clinton was not. Aside from her gender, Clinton was not an exceptional candidate. When it comes to basic empirical measures, she looked remarkably simi- lar to past candidates in terms of likeability, the “cool” factor, policy positions, perceived scandals, and ambition. If Clinton were a white man running with the same years of experience, credentials, and personal traits, she would have been seen as a rather typical presidential candidate— a knowledgeable, somewhat boring policy maven. Trump, on the other hand, was an exceptional candidate in many ways, including his zero years of previous public service, his braggadocio, his hypermasculinity on the campaign trail, the volume and size of his scandals, and his frequent, impetuous use of Twitter to communicate directly with his supporters. His unique candidacy may limit the applicability of our findings to future elec- tions since he enlarged the role of both sex and gender in the 2016 contest relative to what a more typical Republican contender would have done. We use the terms “sex” and “gender” throughout this book to mean two distinct concepts. We define sex as the categories “male” and “female,” which are generally thought to be based in biology.3 We define gender as the cultural roles that are ascribed to men and women and that are simplified into the categories “masculine” and “feminine.” Gender roles are not fixed in biology, as evidenced by the fact that what is considered “masculine” and “feminine” vary widely by culture and dramatically shift over time. Feminist theorist Judith Butler describes gender as a performance that creates gender through internalized, rou- tine actions, the parameters of which are determined by societal ideas of gender roles.4 In other words, gender is socially constructed, not natural,