Warren, Clinton and the sexist hypocrisy of the the "likability" media narrative

So what’s going on here? Has Warren become incredibly unlikable over the past two years? Or is this change more an indication of her growing power. High-achieving women, sociologist Marianne Cooper wrote in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, are judged differently than men because “their very success — and specifically the behaviors that created that success — violates our expectations about how women are supposed to behave.” When women act competitively or assertively rather than warm and nurturing, Cooper writes, they “elicit pushback from others for being insufficiently feminine and too masculine.” As a society, she says, “we are deeply uncomfortable with powerful women. In fact, we don’t often really like them.”

In other words, Warren’s expressed desire to potentially become America’s most powerful politician has changed the calculus. After all, Hillary Clinton was a popular secretary of state; Warren is a popular senator.