Another Empowered Woman Assembly

I attend a college-preparatory day school for girls, so the "how to be an empowered woman" assemblies are nothing new; but I think they're really laying it on thick this year.  In any event, this last one was actually pretty good.  The Dr. Jane Berman Memorial Lecture Series kicked off with Dr. Jennifer Lawless.  Finally the powers that be have seen fit to give us an academic! I think that might be my problem with the vast majority of our empowering women lectures; they reek of propagandist agendas.  This lecture was balanced and accepted both sides of the argument.  This woman was neither a politician nor a journalist.  She was an academic!  And it was wonderful.

Dr. Lawless, a Ph.D in Political Science (the art of finding empirical evidence for the obvious) from Stanford, delivered a balanced lecture on why women don't run and why they should.  I'll give you a preview of why they should: it's not because we're just better at everything than men.  After surveying men and women regarding their political ambitions in the fields of law, business, activism, and education (the four fields most likely to breed political ambition), Dr. Lawless and her team observed a huge gender gap with regard to their political ambition.  After further surveying, she and her team were able to enumerate three main reasons that women don't run even though women do just as well as men when they run.

1. Family Responsibilities
2. Qualifications
3. Recruitment

With regard to family responsibilities, women are still about ten times more likely than men to be responsible for household duties.  Which is not to say that having family responsibilities precludes candidacy, but to say that it does make it more complicated.  It's essentially like having three jobs: whatever pays the bills, being a mother, and running a campaign.  That means that women tend to put off running until their children are out of the house, which (in our political system) means that they have to climb the ladder quickly, start higher, or be content to stay lower.  Which is not ideal to say the least.

Women are also more likely to doubt their qualifications.  They see the fact that less than 20% of elected offices are held by women, so they consider themselves a political anomaly, so they think they have to be way overqualified to hold office.  Lawless told a couple stories from her own political campaign in RI to illustrate this point.  Apparently, when she was running, she was worried that she would be considered under qualified because she was not actually from Rhode Island.  So she essentially memorized the RI almanac.  So, when a caller on a radio interview asked her what effect a ~10% job loss really had on the population of Rhode Island and "What is the population of Rhode ISland anyway?" she answered with the exact population of RI.  Which is kind of creepy.  The other story she told us actually kind of reinforced the idea that women have to be slightly more qualified to be successful. It has to do with look.  See, women in politics tend to look the same.  Which is to say mannish.  And it remains true that women have to meet a certain appearance bar to engage with the voters.  They both have to look really nice but also not too feminine.  Heels and highlights, combined with matte makeup and pants suits.  But, according to the statistics, in comparable campaign efforts women do just as well as men.  They loose just as often as men when running against incumbents and they beat non-incumbents just as often in elections for an open seat.

The third barrier to prospective female candidates is recruitment.  The best predictor of whether women will run is whether they've been told/encouraged to run.  This is kind of the one factor we can change.  Women are both much less likely to be encouraged and much less likely to respond to encouragement.  So basically the message of the lecture is it's never too early to start recruiting women to run.  I know you're all bracing yourselves for me to start ranting against feminism, but the next words out of Dr. Lawless's mouth made my heart smile.  According to her, it's totally ok if you decide not to run, you just need to be able to make the choice yourself.  Hallelujah!  Thank you for respecting that!  This is what we should be told, not "If you don't run/act like an empowered woman, you're a submissive fail and part of the problem that it is your duty to solve."  This speech was not a turn off for any ambitions that might be incubating in my brain.  Because I do kind of agree that we should see more women in politics.  For me it's a question of democratic legitimacy.  There is a slight majority of females in the population of the US, but they only hold about %20 percent of all elected offices.  That's not republicanism.  Since we've given women the right to vote, we should see them represented and representing in office.

The part 2 of this lecture was a screening of Miss Representation, but I didn't go to that even though it was mandatory.  It was production week for the musical and I had to be in the theater.  But I actually would have gone.  I was actually somewhat inspired by this lecture.  I haven't been inspired by an empowerment lecture in a long time...