Woman power: Gender was missing in the debate as Joe Biden was under pressure to drop out of the presidential race. — The Sacramento Bee/TNS
IN her concession speech to then President-elect Donald Trump in November 2016, Hillary Clinton declared, “We have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will – and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.”
There was a lot of talk about gender in politics then. Many of us thought that Clinton lost in part because of hard-core misogyny and a softer unconscious bias that led just enough voters to think of presidents only as guys in suits.
I’ve been thinking lately of that glass ceiling because of a conversation we were not having – one about the gender of the Democratic nominee as Joe Biden was taking advice from so many of us to drop out of the presidential race.
Now that Biden has withdrawn, his most likely successor is a Black woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls a bit better than Biden against Trump. Some of us earlier have urged instead that Democrats nominate Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, believing that she would be the nominee most likely to defeat Trump. And a few of us have mentioned talented Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a former governor and a star of the Biden Cabinet.
Our argument isn’t a feminist one about the significance of elevating women. It’s not even an argument that these politicians would perform better than Biden as president. Astonishingly given our history, it’s that they would also be more electable.
Perhaps even more intriguing, gender has largely gone unmentioned all this while. I’ve had people push back at my recommendation of Whitmer on the basis that she’s untested nationally, that choosing her over Harris would antagonise Black voters, that her name recognition is weak. All fair objections. But I haven’t heard anyone scoff: But Whitmer is a woman. We tried that in 2016, and it got us Trump.Another marker of progress in how we evaluate female candidates is that the conversation is about their policies, experience and political prospects. We’re not diverted by, say, their clothing choices.
Granted, a female nominee in 2024 may still pay a price for her gender. Gallup this year found that 5% of Americans still said they would not vote for a female candidate for president. That reflects a steady decline in chauvinism – in 1937, 64% said they could not vote for a woman – but that 5% is still enough to decide an election (of course, conversely, some voters may be more likely to vote for a female candidate).
At least in the past, researchers also found that women faced a frustrating challenge in competing for top jobs. A man could be regarded as both authoritative and a nice guy, but assertive and competent women were often regarded as less likable. That may be one reason even in 2024 only 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
Yet hold on. There’s also some evidence that female leaders outperform men on average.
“Time and again, women leaders have shown that they are not only more sensitive to the needs of women and children, they are also more effective,” said Esther Duflo, a Nobel laureate in economics who has studied female leadership.
Female leaders tend to improve health outcomes, in particular, more than men do. Duflo noted research indicating that countries with female leaders often had lower mortality early in the Covid-19 pandemic than comparable countries with male leaders.
It also seems that even female voting improves health care. One study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that when states gave women the right to vote at the local level between 1869 and 1920, one result was a sharp increase in public health spending, apparently because male officeholders perceived that this was an issue that women cared about. The upshot, the study found, was that women’s suffrage saved 20,000 children’s lives each year.
Another study, published in the American Economic Journal, found that in India, a 10 percentage point increase in female representation leads to a 2 percentage point reduction in neonatal mortality.
American voters seem to be not only shedding old chauvinism but also in some cases seeing women as having advantages. The public once believed that men were smarter than women, while more recently Pew found that people regard women as less decisive than men but often more intelligent as well as more compassionate, honest and creative.
“Americans believe women have the right stuff to be political leaders,” Pew concluded – and yes, it is remarkable that we’re even having this conversation.
Researchers also find that groups do better – for example, in a business context – when they have more women in them and that people think organisations with female leaders operate more fairly.
For my part, I don’t think there is any magic in XX chromosomes, and I’m suspicious of absolutist claims that either women or men are inherently better leaders. Gender is complicated, and the repressive female leader of Bangladesh is now persecuting a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Muhammad Yunus, who has been a champion of the world’s women. I’d argue for avoiding glib generalisations and stereotypes about gender in any direction.
Yet it’s certainly true that any society is better off when it can harness the talent of its entire population, not just half of it.
Americans are also getting more used to seeing women in political offices, and a pipeline is well established. Almost a third of state legislators around the country are female, up from 10% in 1980. Two states – Nevada and Arizona – actually have a majority of female legislators.
Put all this together, and maybe after almost a quarter of a millennium, America is finally ready to elect a female president in 2024. And it’s even more thrilling if we don’t even notice that the “highest and hardest glass ceiling” is not just cracking but maybe, just maybe, disappearing. — © 2024 The New York Times Company
