Mic, Pandemic, and Epic: Gender Effect on Political Leaders’ Nonverbal Communicative Structure During the COVID-19 Crisis

During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been intense interest in political leaders’ nonverbal communicative structures during televised appearances. Nonverbal communicative structure (NCS) plays a central role in perceptions of politicians’ leadership, charisma, confidence, and trust. Leaders’ NCS is essential in affective communication, influence, and persuasion, especially during times of crisis and challenging periods of stress, fear, and uncertainty. Grounded in the role-congruity theory, this study analyzes the gender effect of male versus female leaders’ NCS and presents theoretical and analytical frameworks of gendered NCS, which delineate the unique NCS of male versus female leaders during crisis. We analyzed 20 televised appearances by 10 heads of state (five males and five females) from democratic Western countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis of the leaders’ NCS was a multi-tiered system for observed nonverbal communication classification, which coded gestures, postures, facial expressions, vocalic characteristics, and performance. The findings revealed that gender had a significant effect on leaders’ NCS. Male leaders presented masculine NCS of competition, warning, threatening and scaring behavior, broad proxemics, tension leakage, and illustrative gestures. By contrast, female leaders presented an alternative novel feminine NCS for leadership, which expresses cooperative, emotional communication, empathy, optimism, eye contact, and flexible expressions. Interestingly, the effect of gender on leaders’ NCS had an interaction effect with the situation of the pandemic, indicating that countries with a female leader that presented calm, empathic, and cooperative feminine NCS had fewer diseased and severe cases. These finding are new and important because it was previously assumed that the key to political success for female leaders was the performance of masculine NCS. Our innovative conclusions are that contemporary female leaders do not adopt the masculine NCS of leadership; instead, they present a new leadership style based on feminine NCS. This novel feminine NCS for leadership provides an alternative to masculine-dominated political NCS. The conclusions advance the role-congruity theory and the social construction theory of gender and develop theoretical and analytical frameworks that explain the central effect of gender on contemporary leaders’ NCS. Furthermore, this study presents advanced distinctive profiles for male versus female leaders’ NCS of emotions, cognition, and behavior during crisis. Finally, the conclusions from this study could have meaningful practical implications for effective communication of political leaders. Political leaders may adopt the proposed theoretical and analytical framework to develop and improve their communication skills, persuasion effects, social influence, public support, and cooperation into political success.