Replication Data for: Introducing the American Women Political Leaders’ Operational Codes Dataset

While women leaders assume prominent national offices in the United States (and the world), one of the well-established specializations in political science/psychology, i.e. leadership studies, is inundated with male-centric benchmarks. This research often relies on a reference group to develop leaders’ profiles in comparison to other elites. They are, however, predominantly populated with male leaders. This paper offers a remedy and introduces a women leaders reference group for operational code analysis (a quantitative approach measuring leaders’ beliefs about politics). We gather American women leaders’ speeches from the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Using an automated content analysis, we develop a norming group exclusively for American female politicians in national politics. Whereas our findings mark noticeable differences and suggest some similarities with existing reference groups, we aspire to initiate a conversation and hope more data will follow and shed more light on women leaders. This reference group can serve as a crucial tool in providing contextualized political personality profiles of American women leaders and can offer an illustrative example to bridge leadership and gender studies in advancing the study of women leaders in the United States (and beyond).